When Parliaments Fail

When Parliaments Fail

A Synthetic View
from the Gallery

By

A SYMPATHISER

CALCUTTA 6 SIMLA

THACKER SPINK & CO
1927

Prinfccl by Dircclorics, 6, Jf:ingoc bne, CalcuUa anJ

I’uMi^Iiril by C. F, Hooper, of Thacker, Spink & Co., 3, Cijplaiiado, Calcutta.

CONTENTS

PAGE

ClIAl’TI'U

I.-Wlirn I'aH'nnionts F,

nil to

Function

.. 1

Cn iPTi'R

II. — In France

.. 4

CnAPTI'R

III.— In ElnjIaTifl

.. 19

CtlAi-TGR

IV. — 1)1 Germany

.. 33

Chaptkr

V.-fn Italy

.. 45

ClJ APTHK

Vl.— In Geneva

. . 57

CnAi>r[-('

VII. --In l.'tfioia

.. 7C

PREFACE.

An old friend has asked me to provide
a Preface to this book. What qualifications
I may have for so doing, I at least have
entirely failed to discover, beyond the fact
that the happenings all over the world during
tlie last seven years have led me to a similar
conclusion as that at which he arrives in this
book. Still he has pressed me to write a
Preface to it and accordingly I comply.

The descriptions given of what has been,
and is. happening in the various Parliaments
of Europe may, probably will, lie deprecated
as CA'iiical or exaggerated. To me they
seem substantially true and accurate, bearing
out his conclusions and driving home with
sinister emphasis the question which forms
the book’s title: When Parliaments Fail?

They are failing undoubtedly and that
badly, not in one country alone but every-
where. And they are failing because human
nature is still far more animal than human:
that is, far more impelled and governed by
passions and desires than by reason and
thought. The ape and the tiger are still
stronger and more prominent in men in ^e

IV

mass than is the divine spark that none the
less glows within.

Blit of what use is it to reiterate such
well-worn truisms, and to emphasise them in
regard to the Parliaments of the world?

For those at least who believe — or
hope — that man is divine as well as animal,
it would seem to serve this purpose. Once
a man sees and realises what is wrong and
how it is wrong, the first, often the most
important step, has been taken towards
putting it right.

But what bearing has it on India? Our
India is just entering on democratic and
parliamentary development and one hopes
her guiding intelligentsia, especially the
younger ones, may mark, learn and inwardly
digest the lessons, wlhich this survey of the
position now becoming so marked in Europe,
is well calculated to impress upon them.

Granted that it is not easy to learn from
the mistakes of other folk; still one can so
learn, while the effort to learn and to put in
practice is itself well worth the making.

One might pethaps sum up the situation
of government in general throughout the
world somewhat in this wise. There appear
to be three possible alternatives and three
only. On . one side there is Autocracy,

whether of the proletariat as in Russia, of
the Fascist type as in Italy, or the old Kaiser
type as in Germany before the war. At the
opposite extreme is sheer Anarchy ; whether
of Nihilistic violence or the babbling’ con-
fusion. inefficiency, bad administration,
bribery and corruption into which the author
shows the Parliaments of the world to be
drifting with uncomfortable rapidity.

Between the two extremes lies Con-
stitutionalism: whether Monarchical or Re-
publican. But this form of Government is
always, and must necessarily be, in a state
of more or less unstable equilibrium, its
relative stability and continuance depending
on the balance of mind, the self-control, the
self-discipline of the politicians composing
the democratic chamber in the particular
country concerned. If, as the author points
out in his concluding chapter, the politicians
can subordinate their own selfishness and
their immediate party interests to the general
welfare and stability of the whole, then
Parliamentary Government seems on the
whole to be the best of the possible alterna-
tives.

But unless the politicians can rise to, and
maintain themselves on the whole at, such a
level, then inevitably the Government must

VI

transform itself into some form of auto-
cracy, after passing throug'h a longer oi’
shorter period of Anarchy and confusion.

Such is the lesson to which this little
book points. It remains to be seen whether
men in general and India in particular will
pay heed to it.

For India has entered upon a phase of
rapid change and transformation w'hich now
must necessarily work itself out to the end.

The course of the next few years will
probably decide the issue. The outcome will
ultimately be decided of course by the char-
acter — or. better ])erhaps, the nature — of the
human units composing the nation or in
particular of those units Who constitute the
more intelligent and better educated classes
of the population. And it is to them that
this book seems more especially to be
addressed, for in their hands lies the future
of India.

BERTRAM KEIGHTLEY,

Lucknow University.

CHAPTER I.

When Parliaments Fall to Function:

1. ly/ien Parliament fail to function. 2. IVork and zoorry.
3. Interrogations and interpellations. 4. Scenes, incidents
and accidents.

L Introductory.

“ When parliaments fail to function is a
contingency which may well fill with horror the
over-responsive, unpolitical, public mind. It will
thereafter apprehend a dire state of affairs con-
terminous with anarchy, grazing on red ruin. It
will fervently wisli such national calamities never
to occur.

Ibarliamcnts are, in sober fact, to a large
degree, delicate machines, which the human ele-
ment easily may, and frequently docs, throw out
of gear. Ihis human element may be diversified:
caprice, ambition, lust for power, party feeling,
panic, prejudice may, in various permutations and
combinations, enter into that human factor.
More often, a mere accident may upset the balance
of such machines. In tiie capricious, unforeseen
and unforescealde course of a so-styled debate,
deliberation may entail discussion; discussion may
lead on to digression and further digression; an
irrelevant remark or aside or interjection may open
the valve to ill-suppressed party feeling; passions
may flare up; and in the turmoil, for a good long
while, parliament may cease to function.

The running years have so far failed to import
peace and harmony into the perturbed parliaments
s, PF 1

2

of Europe. They have worked and worried:
worked a little, perhaps not enough ; but wgrried
certainly and disproportionately more. And
worry, now, is failure. For whatever the label or
synonym or euphemism you give it, worry is
worry — waste of time, temper, energy. It is bad
enough for the private individual who can never-
theless with relative buoyancy and ease recoup his
energy, recover his temper, make up for lost time.
But in parliament such triple waste may be trebly
disastrous, and the disaster may certainly be real
if not realised at once. For a nation's time, its
temper, its energy are the three vehicles of politi-
cal progress which it unreservedly places, for good
or ill, for use, abuse or disuse, at the service of
its parliamentary delegate. He is in an invisible
serse its nation-builder, and what builder may
afford to misuse his tools? But when a sitting is
suspended and parliament has ceased to function,
we reluctantly infer that the builder has downed "
tools and walked out.

Evidently he is not satisfied. What workman
is? Entirely within his rights, he is dissatisfied
and he shows it.

Interrogation and interpellation are the tAvo
most obvious and facile modes of anticipating and
expressing dissatisfaction, right or wrong. These
are processes which in the fierce heat of a par-
liamentary duel evoke any or all emotions from
frenzied joy to acute distress. It is playing with
passion.

Generally at this stage there may be enacted
impromptu scenes and incidents, not to speak of
accidents, which the lay unpolitical mind does not

3

willingly associate with processes of explanatory
Reasoning or calm deliberation. They occur and
recur without ostensible cause, without rhyme or
reason. That, anyhow, is the verdict of those who
have elected and sent the delegate, at great cost,
to the parliament-house. And the average elector
may not be over-intelligent, but he always has the
last word, and must be respected.

The estranging, obstructive effect of such
scenes, incidents and accidents in the different par-
liaments of Europe merits more than passing
notice. Only after examining and analysing that
effec t will it be possible for us to answer the pro-
foundly searcliing and disturbing question : Is a
parliament doing its duty by its people?

CHAPTER II.

In France:

1. The french Chamber. 2. ''An interpellation is in progress,
Sir!'* 3. Cheers and counter-cheers; shouts and counter-
shouts. 4. When arguments are no arguments. 5. The final
clash. 6. A suspended sitting. 7. A resumed sitting.
8. Idle interruptions. 9. Postponements. 10. Delaying
propositions. 11. Misleading propositions. 12. PusAing
propositions. 13. Provocative propositions. 14. The Master
of the House.

Observe and inspect the French Chamber of
Deputies. What a symbolic site and approach !

The clamorous avenues of the City’s fevered
life converge ui)oii the big, open Place of Concord,
commingle and arc then no more. The City’s
surge is drowned in the buzz of a thousand auto-
mobiles, scattered moth-like over that vast space.
Away over yonder, across the wide river stands
the Temple of Political Virtue — a classic dome,
chaste, sedate, awesome. This is the parliament-
house of France, the repository of the Rights of
Man.

The main portal is barred. You wonder why?
Libert}" — or is it Law? — in steel helm and volu-
minous drapery, in severe contrast to the classic
nudity of the friezes in the background, stands
right there with uplifted finger in solemn, symbolic
guard. The finger warns : Who sees ? Who cares ?
Perhaps it is too high. And the friezes in chiselled
intone above and around, whatever they may imply,
are decidedly chilling. You pass on.

5

You betake yourself to the side entrance, and
so on to the back“Sta?rs. A bumpkin in smock
brushes past you. Yc;u are intrigued. Is it a
repairing mason, or is it a detective? Or can it
be, dismal alternative* a duped voter in search of
his delegate and vowing vengeance? The species
is not extinct.

U|) ponderous flights of steps you go — you are
iinpe^U\l along by some secret force. On the way
you pass the landings. Here little grouj^s, in twos
and threes, of anxious faces encounter you. Watch
the one nearest. Is it inner agony or outer bore-
dom writ large on massive features? Perhaps the
“great friend” is in inaccessible mood. Perhaps
the “ little friend ” is otherwise engaged. You

Wonder “Murderers,” “cut-throats/^

crooks ” or some such rude sounds shouted far
away, as if in a^'*othcr world. l)rcak in upon your
wonderment. You pass on, past officials in black
languorously caressing their silver neck-chains.

Shouts and counter-shouts. You collapse into
your coiner in the Undistinguished Strangers’
Gallery. Cries of shame or good fame, cheers and
jeers alternate. The Extreme Left is on the war-
path. The Near Left does not know its own mind
and is patiently lost in contemplation of its own
distress. The Centre is wobbly. I'he Right is
stunned into silence by the onslaught.

A kindly neighbour observes to you, super-
fluously: “An interpellation is in progress,

Sir!”

That is putting it too coldly and is emphatic-
ally wrong. The interpellation came to a sudden
stop long ago. It was just killed.

6

For the moment, speaker and his interrupter
and their audience are lost in the tqrtuous cross-*
currents of dialectic. Expletives and invectives are
flung about and bandied like confetti. A little
irrelevancy leads to a big irrelevancy and the big
one to a bigger one. Mr. Interpellator is frozen
into silence ; or is it cunningly that he affects
indifference? He does not count.

He ceased to count a good long while ago. He
has friends, more zealous than wise, and it is they
who are prolonging his stay in the tribune. One
such indiscreet friend with a chance interjection
rouses the Right and Centre to fury. President
and tribune at once recede into the background.
They might have been dropped into oubliettes just
where they stood. For they are clean out of the
picture. Now interruptions are met with inter-
ruptions and a champion interrupter from the
Right or Centre takes up the gage and explosively
delivers himself of a diatribe against the inter-
jector from the Left and all his tribe. He fumes,

gesticulates, shouts and loses his voice.

Centre and Left cheer frantically as his impromptu
oration comes to that undignified end. What was
he saying or going to say you could not catch ; nor
could they. But he is one of them, and whatever
he has said or left unsaid is enough for them,
thank you. And don't you interrupt or disturb the
entranced gallery with idle questions.

When the last ripple of the last round of
hectic applause to the accompaniment of waving
arms and tossing hair and flashes from the heads
of^the hairless has quite died away, the gentleman
from the Left tries another taunt, hurls another

7

abuse, and claps in self-applause at the presumed
*hit. . And the handful at his end clap with him in
chorus.

Dumbfounded the bulk of the house looks
pathetically on, it is obviously distressed. It is
just inarticulate in its helplessness.

The President — yes, there is or was a pre-
sident somewhere — re-emerges into prominence
with the tinkling of his bell and the toc-toc-toc of
his stick. Perhaps, in fact most probably, he was
ringing the bell and tapping the table with his stick
all the while, during every minute after minute
that the rounds of party applause reverberated
through the hall. But his bell remained inaudible
and himself invisible. It must have been a thank-
less job ringing an inaudible bell. But he re-
arrests the attention of the hall. The amphi-
theatre is again at his feet; he is again at its
head. The ten long minutes, or was it longer, are
finally over, during which he was cut out or frozen
out of office.

Entry in the record of progress : Order
restored, President re-controls the situation.

The President appeals to the orator in the
tribune to restrain his wild men on the Left. The
orator resumes his manuscript oration meekly.

There are times when arguments are no argu-
ments, when worthy occupants of the tribune
cease to argue, or when they argue not to convince
but to score a flashy party triumph amid general
discomfiture. At all times arguments are argu-
m^ts, elusive, boring, incomplete. How sweet
and fascinating to drop them for a moment, to
turn aside, to go for an admission, or a failing, *or

8

the personality of a member of the group or party
you wish to trounce. And 'how piquant if . the
member, you wish to show as sinning, sinned when
in power. You now quote him against his own
party, against himself. That brings a sober ex-
governmental, perhaps mildest of men and best of
citizens and ever a pillar of propriety, unerringly
and undeniably to his feet.

This releases another storm. For he, a fury
in black and white, sees red, rushes into t'he arena,
insists on being heard, and will not be denied.
He is clamant ; he must ride the storm he has
released, his own storm ; he must nail the lie to the
mast ; he must be right with his own men, at peace
wit'h his own conscience. He must come to word,
right there and then. He must.

But the tribune is occupied, and the right of
speech with another. And the president and his
stick and his bell appeal, each in a characteristic
way but all frantically, for Order, Order. Slowly,
surely, finally that appeal goes 'home. The pre-
sident promises right of immediate speech as soon
as the orator in the tribune has completed his
oration. And the roused one inevitably submits.

While the roused one and the presiding one are
settling their differences, the last say, the last
word, the last laugh in the matter has all along been
with the be-spectacled, pale-faced, sly occupant of
the tribune. “ Wait a moment,” you almost hear
him chuckling and saying to himself over his
closely penned manuscript, “ Wait and see and
count how many more of you frogs will be jump-
ing up in the air in the near bye and bye, you
croakers ! ” Singularly sweet, if also sinister, must

9

have been his long soliloquy, while the order-maker
and the order-breaker were composing their
quarrel to the bewilderment of the whole house
and the thronged gallery.

The manuscript reader resumes his reading in
the same un-personal, unyielding monotone as
formerly, as if he were reading a lesson in a
classroom. Charge after charge is read out, as if
by a clerk in a court of law. The silence in the
house grows deeper, heavier, oppressive and
ominous. The modest one, whose voice permeates
the hall in placid reaches, was for counting just
how many more members jump to their feet in
protest : one, two, three. The reality surpasses
his wildest guess.

The whole house is in an uproar, vociferating,
gesticulating to the tintinnabulation of a bell, and
the toc-toc-toc of a stick somewhere in mid-air.
The din defies understanding.

Eventually stick and bell outpace and outlast
the cries and gestures of dissent. The presiding
one is adamant. Previously he might have been
for turning one’s face away in scorn and lofty
indignation from provocative statements utterly
divorced from truth, but now he will exact the full
penalty. The gentleman in the tribune must either
un-mean what he says, or un-say what he means.

The gentleman in the tribune proposes to do
neither. For, look you, my friends ! ’’ he says, or
might say, with elfish joy, “ I have put it in black
and white after much mature consideration T’

How much midnight oil or current ^went to
mature those considerations is a matter which
does not intrigue the house, but the expiatory

10

explanation is still withheld and delay only strains
its patience to breaking-point.

The gentleman in the tribune is obdurate.
He will not yield. Evidently he is working for a
crisis, and the crisis does overtake him. In a voice
almost breaking with passion, the sorely tried
president takes disciplinary action: he reprimands
him, censures him, suspends him. And with him,
the sitting is likewise suspended, not in silence
but in terrible confusion, for already the uproar is
deafening. The house is like a lusty babe trying
the full power of its lungs, but technically it has
dissolved, and therefore the less said about it the
better.

After an interval which looks practically un-
limited the house reassembles. It is in a more
chastened mood, almost penitent. You wonder
how long this virtuous phase is going to last.

Another delegate from the Left takes posses-
sion of the tribune. He is heard in patience, as he
speaks what is common knowledge. In an easy
canter he presents cold colourless facts. In pass-
ing he has a fling at what he witheringly terms
secret diplomacy of the governmentals. Their
leader is promptly on his feet, claiming the right
to explain. He is allowed to do so, and in sum
makes a long statement from his desk.

The statement, if that is the right name to
give to what degenerates into a series of disjointed
remarks in reply to discursive interjections, is
scarcely allowed a chance to be heard, seized and
digested. Friends applaud zealously: enemies
protest mechanically; eventually, all rely on read-
ing it in the morning paper. This, according to

11

its political creed, may give it prominent headlines
and a place of honour, or it may sandwich it in
between a tonic and a toothpaste, strongly recom-
mending either. But we digress.

The volley of interjections rises to a crescendo.
Another lusty-lunged babe from the infants’ class
of the Left takes the quietus. For he is formally
castigated with bell, book and stick, and after a
Parthian shot, which rakes up ancient history and
shakes to activity skeletons reposing in his
accusers’ cupI)oards, he bundles himself out of the
council-hall.

The council proceeds still more animatedly.
Another irrepressible jack-in-the-box adorning the
Left indulges in unrehearsed effects; his gestures
and shouts attract or distract general attention.
He is pulled up by the president. “ But it is all
so amusing to us on this side ! ” is his apology or
explanation for the noise. “ Amuse yourself
silently ! ” shouts back the champion of law and
order.

Interruptions to the placid flow of debate may
take various forms and proceed from strange
quarters. They are puzzlingly sudden and kaleido-
scopically new. At rare times, they are a treat and
express the sense of the house when a prosy old
boy is stepping on the gas and exceeding time and
speed limit alike.

Self-sufficing iconoclasts in the hall, usually
seated or standing — more often standing — in the
extreme wings of the hall, will take the infelicitous
course of punctuating proceedings not to their lik-
ing with shouts of “ Down with this,” “ Down with

12

that,” the subject of their curt condemnation being
any body or thing, from bourgeois to kings.

But such interruptions are idle ; they are, at
root, confessions of failure. At best, they imply
that the impatient fellow is anxious to put the
house wise in the minimum of words, to contribute
effectively to the debate at the psychological
moment there and then, but he can find no better
means to serve him than a cat-call or a party cry.
They do no real harm, but much depends on the
temper of the house, and on the provocation given.
There is always a live menace to the debate : it may
be side-tracked or even definitely derailed.

More Subtle are the moves for or against
postponement. The basic object they are calcul-
ated to serve may be ulterior, indirect, remote. A
simple harmless question may entail declaration of
a comprehensive far-reaching policy, which may be
all the more difficult or distasteful to make, if no
such policy exists. Or, maybe, a departed leader
chalked out in dotted lines the rough trend of such
a policy. In a rare exercise of discretion he had
refrained from giving it body, shape, form. He has
departed. His capacious mantle has fallen on
others, but he has inadvertently taken his thinking-
cap with him. Or his mantle has fallen to the
ground and there is none to succeed him.
Urgently, the party may be called upon to declare
itself, to vote. It has already deliberated,
cogitated, indulged in that sport of autocrats, a
camera sitting. The imperative need of the hour
is postponement, a postponement at all costs.

And a postponement is voted, voted by the
heavy voice of the undecided ones. They are so

13

many; the world itself often seems full of them.
But the decided ones are furious. Extreme Left
and Extreme Right always know their own minds,
and often read into the minds of others. They
join hands successfully to defeat the centre, or all
comers. A queer combination; a strange galley-
ful of ill-assorted die-hards. It is an accidental
turn of the kaleidoscope, amusing if unsuccess-
ful.

But postponements are radically wrong and
indefensible, however successful the vote that
carries them through. Then come in delaying
propositions, which have all the essence of a post-
ponement with none of its nudity. As one such,
it may be seriously proposed to withhold credits
until the recipient has sufficiently cleared his
motives. Or it may be still more seriously pro-
posed to refer the matter to the League of Nations.
Or it may be finally proposed to appoint a com-
mittee of the house to take supreme charge of the
whole affair. This, it accepted, would mean a con-
fession of want of policy and a pooling of helpless-
ness, but the bitter pill will be silver-coated with
the pleasing promise that thereby a united front
was going to be presented to the country and the
world. At times, in short, there is no alternative
too absurd for consideration as a delaying pro-
position.

But delaying propositions are usually barren
of results. There is more fascination with pros-
pect of final success in a proposition which mis-
leads. Such misleading propositions secure a
delay or postponement without the odium ^ or
trouble attendant on direct solicitation. The

14

mechanism of a misleading proposition is very
simple.

Raise a false issue, the falser the better, and
persevere in it. Somebody is sure to be incensed,
perhaps also implicated, feel himself aggrieved,
and lo, he plunges into a heated but futile dis-
cussion blindly. If that somebody was somehow,
somewhere in a position of authority, you may
rely on him being touchy enough to call for instant
satisfaction, to hurl prudence to the winds, and
finally to help you out of your dilemma by creat-
ing a first-class scene.

But false issues are double-edged weapons, or,
differently pictured, boomerangs, which may
return and strike you back. The aggrieved one
has superior knowledge, and may also have superior
skill. He may press you to define your own
attitude, a hateful thing to do when you do not
know it clearly yourself and are obviously in a
hurry. What is still more distasteful, the rest of
the be-mused house may join in the pressure put
upon you.

It is at this stage that pussling propositions
come in useful. When hard-pressed for relief and
compelled to define your position, make full use of
negative extremes, give free rein to your imagina-
tion. Your position is not this, and it is not that,
so you assert as you wander leisurely from one
negative extreme to another. The right mean, if
any, will manifest itself in course of time to such
as are interested enough to know it. But who is?
And who cares? Anyhow, your object is gained.
For you have not committed yourself, but wriggled
out'^of an uncomfortable corner in the debate.

15

But maybe you just fail to wriggle out of a
tight corner, and are held at bay. All is fair in
love and war, perhaps also in debate. You assume
to yourself the benefit of that doubt, and with a
prayer to international democracy you throw out
a provocative proposition. This is a challenge to
the whole house. It may treat your provocation
with disdain, but it rarely does; it could treat it
with lofty dignity, were some fool of a busybody not
to rush in with a skeleton out of your cupboard.
Some such fool does drag in that skeleton. You
explain, but alas ! do not convince the house, not
even yourself. They shout. Your friends shout
back. Then ensues pandemonium for a while,
probably also a scuffle or a mere exchange of
missiles.

The president intervenes. He has to run with
the hare in the shape of liberty of speech, and hunt
with the hounds in the shape of the country's
multifarious interests. He does both. He catches
the intemperate orator in the toils of his own ex-
cesses, and he trips him up. Then follow the
habitual censure and suspension. That much to
the debit side ; on the credit side, a valuable post-
ponement.

But it would be extremely injudicious to ap-
praise results by personal or even party debit and
credit. While the suspended one or his party may
say to 'himself or itself after an all-night sitting:
One thing attempted, another done, has earned a
day’s repose, what has parliament or the country
gained?

It would be an instructive experiment in group-
psychology to take the vote on the interpellation

16

just before the debate opens and then to retake it
in the usual way, when its tempestuous career
comes to an end. The two votes may just be
identical, or just not so.

If identical, the whole nerve-racking perform-
ance shall have principally been in vain. As to its
incidental effects such as allowing the government
of the day to face hostile criticism, to explain a
difficult situation, to take the public into its con-
fidence, etc., etc., they could all have been easily
secured from the relative serenity and seclusion of
an arm-chair in the cabinet. Why, then, go through,
or even impassively assist at, an unedifying
spectacle in the shape of a public disputation?

But maybe the two votes, taken before and
after the long-winded debate, may just not be
identical. The difference calls for explanation.
How to explain it otherwise than as follows?

Mr. Delegate has come prepared, or so he
imagines, for attack or defence as the case may
be. He is conscious of his own strength; he can
make a shrewd guess as to the reach of the other
fellow’s right arm. He would be singularly lack-
ing in political vanity, were he not buoyed up by
an almost arrogant self-assurance, and the feeling:
“ I know all the guy has to say. ” But — and this
notable exception must be made — ^^he is perfectly
unprepared for the lightning flashes of invectives,
expletives, charges, counter-charges, interjections,
full of sound and fury and signifying something
trivial. He is obviously caught unawares, indeed
swept off his feet, by the concatenation of false
and futile issues raised. But at the moment, when
the presiding one, a pillar of impartiality, may

17

himself, be a-quiver with justful indignation,
^r. Pelegate is too human to glimpse through the
falsity or futility of the false and futile issues
surging up from all sides. The heart of the mat-
ter, on which he has to make up his own mind and
thereby make history, is left leagues behind. The
overwhelming consideration which decides him to
take the plunge into this or into that urn may be
a masterpiece of irrelevancy: an unfortunate
epithet, an acrimonious disclosure, the action of
the president himself in allowing too much or too
little rope to the interpellator or his party, an
unseemly suspension and the oppressive rights and
wrongs of it, and so forth. After due lapse of
time and at leisure, he may succeed in winnowing
the true issue from the false issues that beset it,
but in the heat of the debate, or just after, the nerve-
weary delegate will record a vote reflecting any-
thing but the working of his calm mind, a hasty
vote perhaps and recorded with all the impetuosity
of a boy expecting release from school.

Often the house is thin, and the inference is
obvious ; The bulk of the delegates, at least the
members of the party in power, are not participat-
ing in the debate at all, but otherwise engaged in
the refreshment or retiring room. They thereby
feel that t’hey are letting the obvious take its
course. But they promptly return to the urns
when the bell goes. So their vote is cast inde-
pendently of the debate, and would have been
precisely the same had the parties not stage-
managed a debate at all. This brings us back to
the first case and completes the circle of
enquiry.

S, P?

2

18

Thus, the voting is either on a false, fallacious
issue, or on a practically undiscussed issue. In
either case the debate has been in vain.

For the reason or remedy we must revert to
the picture of the schoolboy in the schoolroom.
When boys are playing truant or squabbling among
themselves, it is not so much that discipline is in
abeyance as that the master has failed to hold their
attention, to mould their minds, to grip them hard.
In the debate-house it is not the president who is
the master of the house. He is only a policeman,
a chucker-out. No, the real master of the house
is elsewhere. He is in the orator’s tribune; «nd
he changes his voice, his personality, his appeal
with every change of orator. For he is — is he
not? — ^the orator himself. In a house full of
delegates of more or less the same calibre, when
its strong ones have been played out or exposed
or saddled with an embarrassing past, and its new
ones are still unbroken or have not yet risen to
their full stature, the course of debate will be
marked sooner by scenes, which neutralise its
effect, or by false issues which confuse it, than by
masterly arguments which hold hard, persuade or
dissuade, by the play of powerful personalities, by
the force of great minds. Unless and until such
arise and take their rightful place — atid a
Demosthenes is not born every day — there is bound
to continue u*relieved the tyranny of me^Jiocrity.

CHAPTER III.

in England:

1. The Heart of St. Stephen’s and The Palace of Westminster.

2, The statue at the gate and the painting pn the tvall. 3. Bn
Route for the Undistinguished Strangers’ Gallery. 4. The
telepathic debate. 5. “We are on the edge of a precipice ” —
fiction and fact. 6. The vision in gray and his moral elevation.
7. The two speakers and two parties. 8. A Lethean atmos-
phere: “So this is what they’re paid for !” 9. fruitless
debate. 10. , Question time. 11. The innocent parent question
and the wicked supplcmentaries. 12. The barrier of caste,
in.side the House. 13. The House of Commons, Incorporated.
14. Civil .Servants All / 15. There is no parliament in
England t 16. The triumph of Suavity.

The heart of St. Stephen’s in the City of
Westminster lie.s between two parallel lines — the
rigid line of a roadway and the sinuous line of,, a
waterway. The water-front is washed and lapped
by the barge-laden putty-tinted river; the road-
facade is agitated by the swirl of raucous, asth-
matic, smoky, auto-vehicles.

Between these parallel lines move the wheels
within wheels of the world’s only empire’s destiny,
or so you imagine, most probably wrongly ! What
these parallel lines enclose is at first glimpse
bizarre. Without the formality of^ a facade or
approach or introduction or By-your-leave, a dark
gray oblong construction rises into the equally
dark gray 'heaven. This is the Palace of West-
minster. It looks so absurdly unhappy in its
new-world surroundings which ill accord with its
austere dignity. No wonder, it shoots straight up

20

like an arrow, as if closing its ears to the screech
of traffic on the" road, and shutting its eyes tp the*
squelch of smoke on and across the water. The
Palace of Westminster takes you a long way down
centuries back in time and millenia back in spirit.

Here, and better than here nowhere, — if for-
tune smile on you, good pilgrim! — you may enter,
and in peace that is primeval ponder and pore over
the puzzles of the day. Six hundred are doing it.

Unlike Palais Bourbon, its French counter-
part, the Palace of Westminster has no need for
idle statuary or frieze wherewith to grip and amuse
or instruct the lingerer. There is a singular,
almost studied, absence of decorative effect, such
as may be achieved through buttress or niche, in-
scription, statuary or frieze. Austerity will not
permit it. The interlocking quadrangles inspire
awe or gloom or both.

Parallel with the roadway is a curious, bald,
blatant stretch of greensward, an awkward lapse
from austere grace, and vaguely out of place in
St. Stephen’s frown of dignity. Set in this islet of
green is the effigy of a gentleman, great in history,
who wears a look of solemn petrifaction and folds
of rugged stone. He is indomitable. You just can-
not afford to^verlook him. For the guardian at
the gate-way to the main entrance will direct you,
idle tfirill-seeker from a strange land, to the busi-
ness-like side entrance just beyond the statue. It
is the one and only statue, and you must not miss
it.

You enter at a brisk pace to traverse without
regret a maze of old, cold, dark, nude chambers,
and then you impinge into the waiting-hall. Here

21

brief halt is to be made. The lo^-harrow panels
engage your attention. Paintings in this hall of
whispers come as a pleasing surprise. One parti-
cularly stands out. You crane your neck anticipa-
ting some stirring scene in the history of parlia-
mentary institutions, some heroic event in depict-
ing which the painter’s eye has in a fine frenzy
rolled. But no, the reality is just otherwise. It
depict.s the hasty and unceremonious exit from the
House of three gentlemen robed in intense black,
slipping unperceived into a row-boat off a back-
door with the clear intention of having themselves
furtively conveyed across the water. You guess :
surely a trio of Guy Fawkeses, who having failed
to fire the House are fleeing from just retribution.
Your guess only shows how little you know the
world’s history.

After a preparatory pause in this forehall, you
plunge into its inner recesses.

You are bound for the Undistinguished
Strangers’ Gallery, and your destination is not yet.
As the mazes, passages, stairways multiply, you
realise all the romance of intelligent expectation
in your quest and persevere.

One narrow and sombre spiral stairway
reminds you of another such in the Towers of
Julius, not very far away. It is so constructed
that the intruder coming up from below shall never
be free to disengage his right arm, while the
defender from above may freely swing and use his
own. But all comparisons are absurdly fantastic
and the thought of medieval rapiers playing over
and into distinguished members’ persons is one
such.

22

You pals,.^ and in tlie avalanche of new im-
pressions the" awesome stairway is forgotten. It*
has led you to a sort of overhead bridge connecting
with another block of buildings. How like the
Bridge of Sighs in Venice! Here, indeed, might the
unseated or unseatable ones foregather, and sigh
for the House that is not theirs.

Another long passage and you debouch on the
Undistinguished Strangers’ Gallery, and glide down
the middle gangway. In two hops, you feel, you
will be in your seat. The hops are slow like a
retarded motion-picture, and how noisy! For, a
debate is in progress !

To pick up the threads of that debate means a
steady effort of the imagination, eye, ear. A dis-
tinguished member — they are all distinguished — is
making a passionate semi-telepat’hic appeal. He
is shouting in whispers. Could you only see his
face you might do some lip-reading. But, as it
happens, his head and half the torso have been
clean cut off, and you just sGe a trunk on two legs
swaying ominously on the edge of a precipice.

It is a precipice ! The hard-looking benches
rise, tier on tier, within a minimum of floor-space;
the steps are so narrow and precarious ; the seats
are so broad and destitute of arms or other ac-
cessories ; no protective, useful desk intervenes
between a distinguished member’s eloquence and a
false step; no friendly tribune is provided whence
he could perorate in peace ; not even a stand or
clasp or folder for his papers, which dissolve into
flying leaves and add to the air of general con-
fusion — the wonder of all wonders is that the dis-
tinguished member, if at all" carried away by fiery

eloquence or righteous indignatio^,i^oes not slip
off his precarious perch and drop info the oubliette
between the bench behind and the bench below
him.

But eloquence is evidently vieux jeu, a played-
out game; and indignation is cheap any day. Both
are detrimental to the conduct of good business,
and short of bigger, deeper oubliettes, every ob-
stacle is interposed to prevent distinguished
members from indulging in either. Such, however,
is the perversity of human nature, especially of
human nature in high places, that it cannot sense
and respect its own limitations. The distinguished
member continues in a peculiarly acid tone of
voice :

“We are on the edge of a precipice. ” He is,
you gather from the voluminous agenda sheets
thrust into your arms by a helpful attendant, dis-
coursing on silk duties.

“We are on the edge of a precipice.... ” he
psalmodises, a political Jeremiah, and will not
be denied. And he rocks like a Long Island
rocker. Word and gesture could not be welded
together more dramatically.

“ We are on the edge of a precipice . . . . ” he
roars, and his prophet eye foresees the death-blow
to industry, the ensuing ominous unemployment,
Ae strangling of foreign commerce, the depraving
reaction on feminine taste, the headlong plunge
into ruin, red ruin, — s'hould the silk duties be voted
and enforced. And he sways and swings still more
violently. The edge of a precipice — his own pre-
dicament.

24

What a f>Qwerfully moving appeal! Surely it
will go home? No. Just watch the other dis-
tinguished members and t'he undistinguished, al-
most irreverent, attitudes they have struck. The
front-benchers are the most hardened offenders.
Having enough elbow-room and leg-space across
the rectangular floor of the House, they adjust their
supple limbs into restful poses, and close their eyes
under the brim of top-hats as if deeply contempla-
tive, and finally doze off. Some restless souls will
converse in whispers. But most fidgety and piti-
able are the back-benchers. They have just got to
keep awake and listen intently, unless they elect
to slip off their uncomfortable seats to either side,
or down into the gap below.

It is the back-benchers, then, who provide the
most eloquence, the most denunciation, the most
heat, the most movement. At present, this move-
ment expend itself in spasmodic changes from one
uncomfortable posture into another.

Another back-bencher succeeds the one on the
precipice. You are more fortunate. You can see
him completely. He is a vision in gray. He wears
a halo of gray locks. In a less thankless age and
more generous clime he would have been statufied
in his lifetime. Here he has only a halo, a more
or less permanent halo, attached to his august
head. What a moral elevation it must give
him!

But all moral elevation is lost when he too
joins in the general denunciation of the duties.
He reads deeper into the duties. He unveils the
inner motives, the subtle schemes of the little men
drest in a little brief authority. Clairvoyantly he

25

^sees these Liliputians with a network of protec-
tive ^duties manacling that giant Gulliver, “ British
Industry.”

He then talks of hill-tops silhouetted against
the gray sky with a solitary enemy figure dominat-
ing them ; he depicts the thousand others toiling
up their reverse slopes whereof that figure is just
an advance guard.

He does not sway. He is used to firmer foot-
ing. But what does he say ? And why does he say
it? And Echo answers, Why?

And so this debate, like a back-broken serpent
on the grass, drags on its weary, wajnvard course
across the green floor of the House. Choose any
moment, and at that moment you will find just
two distinguished members evince any interest:
The first is the orator, the vocal one, because he
will; and tlie second is Mr. Speaker, the strong,
silent one, because he must. These apart, there is
no third to evince any interest, however deeply he
may have been stirred by the course of debate.
This ebbs and flows like a landlocked shallow water,
but such effects are superficial.

The stern reality behind any debate is the vot-
ing strength of the parties. And whatever the
labels they may bear, probably out of vanity, the
number of such parties is always, and strictly,
two:— ^the party in power and the party out of it,
or the Haves and the Havenots. And calling it
practical politics, the bsind of Liliputians, on the
Right side of the House and conscious of their
superior voting strength, safely ignore a wilder-
ness of Gullivers within the House and without.
Visiohs in gray, however blameless their past or

26

candid their future, may grow or fade; the votes
obey only the stern logic of arithmetic ; and legis-
lation, sorry jade, the chain of votes.

In this Lethean atmosphere the wonder at any
time is not, Who is speaking? but Why? “So
this is what they are paid for ! ” observes to himself,
but quite aloud, an irreverent cynic within hear-
ing. There is no time or inclination for you to
undertake such stock-taking as is suggested by the
wag in the gallery. The whole House is in a som-
nolent mood, and the gallery is not immune from
the general predisposition to dolce far niente.

The debate comes to an inconsequent end as it
began, and the result of the voting is a foregone
conclusion. It is essentially decided by the absent
ones who rush into the breach at the last moment,
They have not profited from the debate ; who
has?

Let us now turn to the House in a livelier

mood Interpellation is the call-to-arms in the

French Chambre; Interrogation is the chief diver-
sion of the English House.

Any grievance, local or national, can be aired,
exposed, attacked in two ways or from two ends:
from the bottom or from the top. The former is
the more effective. The local authority concerned
may accept the force of your remonstrance or pro-
test, and redress the grievance. That failing, or
independently, you start at the top by putting a
question to the whole government. You alienate
all the authorities from top to bottom ; you fail to
elicit the desired information; and you convert a
sober parliament into a most unwilling and inefficient

27

information bureau. So converted, parliament has
evidently failed to function.

Question time is very lively time in the House,
which contrives to muster strong and whip up
flagging energies for the occasion. A helpful
janitor, as you entered, has pushed a sheaf of
questions under your arm. While the telepathic
debate is in progress, you have ample leisure to
examine the series of questions.

Some assume extra gravity by beginning with
a star. All end in crosses. It is an altogether un-
intelligible game of stars and crosses. As to sub-
jects they range at random and cover all degrees
of importance and unimportance. You wonder :
Why set all the complicated machinery of a vast
empire in motion for the attainment of information
which would have been more amply and quickly
conveyed to the questioner by the third clerk of
the bureau concerned? Such naive wonder on your
part overlooks the ulterior object served in putting
a question. It serves as a dynamic reminder to the
voter that his distinguished member is alive to his
interests and is doing his duty by him.

More often an innocent-lOpking question is
designed to inveigle the govef^ment spokesman
into an incautious declaration of policy. Usually
this worthy is an assistant or substitute or deputy,
and should he blab too much or rush in where his
angelic Chief feared to tread, the latter can safely
throw him over. But such a contingency arises
rarely. The Chief’s understudies, like all under-
studies, exaggerate the discretion which is the
better part of valour, and cultivate a brevity of
speech as well as thought.

30

himself in full approval. But denizens of the
wilderness are pachydermatous and incorrigible.

A general information bureau may answer
questions more fully, simply and decently, but it
will be obviously lacking in surprises.

Scenes, incidents, idiosyncrasies apart, distin-
guished members have every inducement to pull
together, to conduct affairs in the House on sound
business lines, to co-operate with each other in
heart, deed and spirit. Are they not all one hope-
ful band of Civil Servants? Civil Servants, all?
Paid Servants of the State, paid to run the State
exactly as a railroad’s employees run a railroad,
or an incorporated company’s staff manage that
incorporated cotnpany?

'J'he House of Commons, Inc., is a corporation
which deals very handsomely with its hopeful,
faithful, trusty servants. Let them during its
service develop the civic sense, the business /fotV,
the imperial instinct, and the vista of prospect that
opens out before them fs one inaccessible in his
wildest dreams of bliss to the down-at-heels, out-
at-elbows, bibulous, garrulous, gesticulating Con-
tinental deputy. Committees, commissions, juries,
in a word public bodies charged with a task of
enquiry or construction or administration, in the
innumerable units of a world-empire, offer un-
rivalled opportunities for resolute service. Where
the imperial instinct is strong, a subaltern govern-
orate within the wide marches of the empire will
foster that Promethean glow. There he will rise
on stepping-stones of his dead self to higher
things; there 'he will qualify as empire-builder, as
Pro-consul.. .A prancing Pro-consul, someone said

3t

ecstatically. Very true! What a canvas! B,ut
that, way lies tragedy. Long years ag^ he set out
in glory, and now he returns with gout. Milton
was wrong. The last infirmity of noble minds is
not ambition, it is gout

They manage these things execrably on the
Continent. A French Deputy accepts a distant
governorship far, far away; and lo! his party within
and without the Chamhre ])romptly outcaste him.
An Italian Senator accepts a colonial satrapy, and
he is pursued with jeers, as though he -were the
last of the untouchables.

The House of Commons, Inc., is a wonderful
nursery of Healthy Imperialism, of True Citizen-
ship of the World. The morose cynic will say:
What a far cry from the old House of Commons,
the free parliament of free men that it was before
it went Inc., and transmuted its free men, its Com-
moners, its conscience-keepers, into serried ranks
of Civil Servants. From that epoch onward the
free Parliament of England has ceased to function.
There is no Parliament in England.

There can be no useful reply to criticism like
this whiejh is wholly cynical. Cuarda c passa !

Business is business, even if a trifle dul>. The
debate will take its somnolent sinuous course, and
lead on somehow, somewhere. The numerical
strength of uninspired voters, unshackled by man-
dates, will decide the legislation of the day.
Questions will do no harm, if left unanswered ; and
probably no good, if they are. Rude words, such
as “ Russia, ” “ Gallipoli, ” will be rebuked with
silence ; lapses from-grace, with contefipt. A clear

32

spirit of co-operation will inspire and elevate the
whole House.

In the French Chambre, under the thin guise
of free speech, crocodiles may gnaw at each others'
tails. But here in this House there is something
better than free speech. It is soft speech, fair
speech, sweet speech, such as most becomes XTivil
Servants, who sit on revolving stools and “have
the honour to be ” — the triumph of suavity !

CHAPTER IV.

In aermany:

h One Lieutenant and ten meft. 2, The Monument of
Victory, 3. Trustees of the Reich. 4. Every colour must
have its day, 5. Diplomatefiloge, 6. German and English
female M. P.*s, 7. Lady Dignity in Blue ! 8. The business
of the House. 9. A Grand Guignolesque Deputy. 10. Lady
Dignity, communist i 11, Tame Generals. 12. Fiery denun-
ciation, 13. He laughs!'* 14. Democracy in extremis:
falling beizveen two stools, monarchism and communism,
15. Cinderella after the ball: the mirage of monarchism.

One lieutenant and ten men were once con-
sidered more than a match for the Imperial
German Reichstag. An irate deputy once uttered
a threat to bring it to its senses with one lieuten-
ant and ten men. In those days suffragettes who
adventured into the Fatherland in quest of votes
for women were held up with this pathetic plea
from the men: “Why, here, even we men have
no votes ! “ But now this feeling of impotence and
subjection is a mere memory, a joyfully forgotten
memory. This, at least, may be placed to the
credit side of the War.

Berlin's Lustgarten, or pleasure garden for the
people constitutes its one and only lung. At the
apex of that lung there stands, like a truncated
cone, a dome-capped building with inconspicuous
abutments at the sides and shiny white drives
going round it. It looks eminently like a Grand
Opera House, but it actually is the House of the
Reichstag,
s, py

3 .

34

The Monument of Victory, a vision of gold and
glory, used to remind the Reichstag of its. vast
heritage before the war. CulminMing in tbe
Tower of Victory is the Avenue of Victory with
marble effigies of the devoted autocrats, who had
made Prussia what she had been and was, again
before the war. The Avenue of Victory was a per-
manent exordium to the new race of builders of
the Reich drawn from the plebs of w'hat they had
inherited, what they had to hold, guard and please
God! extend.

Some say these trustees of the Reich proved
untrue to their trust, and unworthy of their glori-
ous heritage, losing overnight w'hat centuries of
efficient rule had conserved and consigned to their
care. Others say that the unbridled spirit of the
lieutenant and ten men broke the Reich. Such
arc the divergent view-points of the impenitent
militarist and the ardent democrat. Both are
crying over spilt milk and both are wrong.

The Reichstag-house is decidedly modern in
aspect, unlike the pompous Palais Bourbon, in
France, or the medievally-cloistered House of Com-
mons in England. Suited to the democracy it
houses, the Reichstag-house looks a thing of recent
growth, like Wagnerian opera. Its foyer, with the
wide sweep of winding stairway galleries, must
surely look their best on gala nights. The fittings
in crimson and gold, the baroque decorations, the
heavy W. R.-monogrammed furniture of the boxes
proclaim the lofty expectations of the designers.

But Fate has frowned severely on their gran-
diose designs. The ubiquitous democrat has
imported into this palatial building not only the

35

wild spirit of liberty but also the ungainly body of
democracy, of democracy of the dregs, of slum-
dom, of the ghetto. Upholstery meant for more
delicate use is heavy with the sweat of Spartacus.
Royal crimson is fading to invisible pink under the
redder patches of post-war commotion. But there
is no room for regrets. Ever}' colour must have its
day.

You slip into your royal box, called disrespect-
fully after those anaemic willowy creatures — diplo-
mats, “ Diplomatenloge.” You slip into your seat
with a feeling of vacuity, your foot-fall dying on
the heavy carpet and your heart almost faint from
a sense of awe within you. However relentless
and revengeful the present, it is the past which
dominates you, oppresses you, unnerves you.

Below you, the seats are arranged in semi-
circles, like the cross-section of a perfect onion.
Each seat is a perfect article of commodity, with
desk and shelf in front, while radial gangways,
radiating from the central tribune below split up
the sets of benches into more numerous divisions
than the freaks of party politics can ever make at
any time.

The parties’ seats are arranged from right to
left, from extreme conservatism or monarchism to
extreme communism or Bolshevism. The popular
parties take the centre and spread themselves over
to either side according to their extremer shades.
But most fascinating with their vivid splashes of
colour are the twenty odd ladies in brilliant attire,
who have most fortunately for aesthetic effect dis-
dained to band themselves together into any so-
called Women’s Party, but have preferred to

36

scatter themselves at random throughout the hall.
No false sense of political perspective or unduly
high feeling of their vocation seems to suppress
their buoyancy, or afflict them with clerkly stiff-
ness or to squeeze them into harsh and angular
tailor-mades, as is the case with their English
sisters.

A sombre-suited matron here would be hard
to find. The colourfully dressed ladies are the
tools of destiny, the instruments of equity. For
the genius loci, or the spirit of the place, however
thwarted by that after-war incubus of democracy,
must confess to feeling a warm thrill at the sight
of these warm, vivid, colourful figures.

One, in particular, is dressed in resplendent
blue, fold on fold, gowned like a Roman matron,
and looking quite as dignified and authoritative.
You cannot take your eyes off her. The weary
occupant of the tribune is struggling through a
long attributive phrase peculiar tO' involved
German construction ; possibly he has skipped a
whole line of his manuscript, and is therefore
somewhere repeating himself. But you are indul-
gent, and do not mind. For your curious, idle
attention is pre-occupied with Lady Dignity in
blue. How insolently blue silk shines forth in this
gathering of “ grave and reverend signiors ” !

The house is not quite full, but gaps, where-
ever they be, are inconspicuous. ITie absentees
could not be staying away by habit. Decidedly,
these German deputies take their business more
seriously than do their colleagues across the sea.
Decidedly, they could not be paid for doing their
work, you blandly wonder.' Otherwise they would

not enthuse over it so childishly; otherwise they
would have cultivated that air of beatific poise, not
to say repose,* which a high moral sen^e of labour
done and wages won alone confers.

But to know is to understand. And you know
that all these earnest deputies, from Deputy A to
Deputy Z, are still in their swaddling clothes ; that,
anyhow, they have yet to get into long trousers ; that,
for all their aged looks and sapient ways, they only
date back to 1918. They are not even Misters,
just Deputy A to Deputy Z. They have no tags to
their names, no labels, no titles. They are not
even Honourable or Distinguished. At grips with
realities, they scorn to hold shadows, so they say
or feel, if you could only look into their bullet-
heads.

The business of the House is in full swing. A
bill is in course of second or third reading. Para-
graphs, unamended, or amended, or re-amended,
are put to the House and voted upon. Every now
and then this lively House empties itself ; it flows
out into the lobbies ; and then it refills, each deputy
returning through the door of Ayes or the door
of Noes as suits his political persuasion. What an
efficient mode of voting! It is easier to count up-
right heads walking in on two legs than a forest
of crooked hands or forearms, held out at all angles
and distracting the counter by their unsteadiness.
But there is a pre-requisite to success : you must
take your deputyship seriously. There is no
amateurishness, miscalled sportsmanship, about
your Teutonic deputy.

Now comes the speechifying. The bill flung
on the floor of the House for consideration and

38

discussion proposes a grant of amnesty to political
offenders. And ‘serious deputies, seriously roUsed,
do let themselves go.

Amnesty for political offenders ! What a bone
of contention between party and party, between a
chief and his party, and among the rank and file
of any party. There is hardly a political group
without sympathies to extreme right or left.
Hence every deputy, party or group is acutely
interested in the bill.

A Social Democrat opens the ball, and leads
with a clear expression of discontent with the am-
nesty proposed, as it does not go back enough. He
complains that justice instead of being above
parties and classes, had become an instrument of
political oppression in the hands of one party
against the others. He complains of class-justice
which is the very negation of justice. He even
insinuates most provocatively that French judges
in Occupied Territory had been behaving with
more impartiality than German judges. This
plunge into anti-patriotism with a view to scoring
a cheap, dialectical point rouses the two extremes
of the House to fury. It is all very well for back-
ward races to extol the blessings conferred by an
alien judge or an alien magistrate, but to expect
genuine Teuton flesh and blood to respond to such
a call is more than the House can bear.

In a voice shaking with emotion the Vice-
president appeals to the orator to restrain himself.
The appeal is from time to time reinforced with
further passionate appeals, but the orator is not
easily controlled.

He is followed by the lady in blue. She demands
amnesty for all the members ot the great pro-
letariat rotting in prison. A communist to her
finger-tips, she is an easy first in violence of
speech. She calls German justice a soulless means
of holding the German workman down, and the
amnesty bill a special instrument to operate the
release of monarchist law-breakers. She demands
amnesty all round. She even threatens to bring
the deputies to her own way of thinking through
the Unions’ Executives, which would apply the
necessary pressure.

She speaks with a wealth of words and ges-
tures, in rich, ringing tones that reduce the House
to impotent silence. Her denunciation of the
powers-that-be is electrical in effect. But it is all
so unnatural. The House does not seem to mind
it, and it is soon forgotten. But it is extremely
doubtful if the House would have stood such pro-
vocation from a mere male.

Communism is evidently very vocal in the
House but it is not very effective or strong. And
the strange sight of a very refined-looking, mat-
ronly lady in gaudy silk, preaching high commun-
ism, fascinates and amuses but it does not impress,
still less does it convince.

The next item on the agenda is still more of
an eye-opener. It is the first reading of a bill
regarding the military uniform.

Here again an embittered Social Democrat
leads the fight. Here is a pacifist at heart, or by
profession, probably really neither. But his osten-
sibly unexceptionable pacifism expends itself in
overt and covert attacks upon the army. To watch

40

the military members of the Government in attend-
ance endure those attacks in silent, agonised .des-
pair is to realise something like the* patience of
Job. Before the war, a lieutenant and ten men
would have made short work of such provocative
busybodies. And now senior generals of very
high rank have to listen to them in solemn silence.
Without taking sides in these domestic squabbles
you cannot help saying to these high officers : “ Tu I’ as
voulu, Georges Dandin, tu I’as voiilu!’’

In the speeches that follow denunciation and
reproach alternate. It is not easy to distinguish
between truth and special pleading.

Says one:

" One hundred fatherlandless devils in the Ruhr
have accomplished more for Germany than all you
babblers and idlers ! ”

And again:

“ So-and-so has had courage enough to accept
full responsibility for the murder of officers. He

should be given credit ”

And then:

“ Murder is murder. Why do you view with
so much abhorrence one murder more than an-
other? ”

To the offer:

“ I will explain the principles of murder, ”
comes the reply:

“To hell with your principles ! ”
and the rebuke:

" I see in the smile of Mr. So-and-so a sign of
utter depravity ! ”

While all these sparks of indignation have been
shooting up from the tribune, a miserable, anaemic-

41

looking individual on H legs leaning heavily
against a desk in the middle of a* radial gangway
looks round, grins and delivers himself of a guffaw
of incredulity.

This is enough to work up the orator and his
party to a frenzy of annoyance. " He laughs ! ”
exclaims one of them, and abuse upon abuse is
heaped on his devoted head. There is real courage
in facing a hostile crowd on legs only, when one
cannot run away, and the hilarious pale-faced one
shows it.

The bewildered president addresses another
incoherent appeal for moderation. He has not the
toc-toc-toc or the ting-ling-ling of the French
President, wherewith to drown disorder in such
emergencies, but the sight of his massive form
going up and down is more effective as a sedative.

Nowhere else in the world could a mere
guffaw prove a red rag to the bull, which is Demo-
cracy in power in Germany to-day.

Why is democracy so irritable? you ask, for a
democracy which is intolerant and impatient is
worse than no democracy. The reason is that
German democracy is not in power really. It has
got the name, the shadow of power, but the hard
reins of power are held by other hands. It has
the shadow, the illusion ; another, the substance
and reality.

Democracy in Germany is something transi-
tional. It is too weak and unsteady to consolidate
its position. It foresees a day, when it may have
to make room for monarchy or communism. Ex-
treme Right and Extreme Left are both on the
alert, if not openly and actually on the war-path.

42

Both are exhibiting a clear tendency to encroach
on and penetrate ’into the central hloc which .holds
together the prescriptive preserves ‘of liberalism
and democracy. Time alone will decide which is
to get in there first.

Such are the considerations which must pass
through the head of every genuine German demo-
crat when he puts on his thinking-cap. But the
Reichstag is certainly not the right place for using
that adventitious aid to reflection. Here he must
act, and strike, and strike hard while the iron is
hot. This psychological dilemma may somewhat
explain the fiery heat of denunciation, and im-
patience with criticism, and intolerance of rival
parties, which a German democrat rightly or
wrongly exhibits in the Reichstag to-day.

But in his calmer moments he is very senti-
mental and pedantic. He proceeds in his peculiar
dry monotone to utter copy-book maxims for the
benefit of misguided German officers before him
and in the country at large.

He says that it is more honourable to be a ser-
vant of the people than a servant of the Kaiser.
You wonder why this reference to a person who
has no official existence or recognition in modern
Germany. Evidently, the Kaiser may go, but the
spirit of Kaiserism remains.

He further says that a population does not
exist for the sake of the authorities, but the
authorities do exist for the sake of the population.
This is addressed to the Junkers who manned the
German Civil Service before the war. Evidently,
Junkers may go, but the spirit of Junkerism
remains.

43

He also says: “I am not an enemy of the
soldier, but of the system. ” Has, then, the war
;been fought hnd lost in yain ?

He is willing to fraternise with the soldier.
The Reichswehr soldier is his Bundesgenoss, his
pal, and that certainly is a feeling of brotherly love
for the military, which the pre-war democrat never
entertained.

But what about the monai'chist soldier ? He is
a relic of the Great War. For him, apparently,
there is no place in the democrat’s big heart. He
is downright hostile, if no worse, to that ill-
equipped, debile species which failed to survive the
great struggle for e.xistence decided in 1918.

“ It is extraordinary,” he says, " that the
Republic should esteem the old imperial uniform
so highly. Nowhere except in Germany would
such a topsy-turveydom be possible.”

And now comes the supreme fling: If these
officers still cherish the old monarchist uniforms,
why did they not fight for them in 1918? How-
ever, he presents that sour alternative to the
serious consideration of monarchically-minded,
irresponsible young officers and passes on to sfng
the praises of the New Republic.

He is proud to be a German, proud to be a
German Republican, proud of a Germany which
remained healthy enough to rise to sublime
heights through Republicanism.

This sturdy, hard-headed, horny-handed. Re-
publican or Democrat is not tilting at windmills or
fighting shadows of his own imagination, or
exhibiting a needlessly bellicose spirit for his own
pleasure. He knows, he feels that a deep way

44

down the heart of half Republican Germany there
is a soft corner for the Kaiser and King. He sees
that Young Germany, despite the trrbulationfe of
the War, which robbed it of nurture, and softened
its bones, and stunted its physique, and imprinted
on the visage of yout'h the pallor of age, still
cherishes an ideal, the ideal of a definite return to
pre-War Germany. He dimly realises that despite
the pyrotechnics of communism and lip-loyalty to
the Republic, the old unmistakable kerngesund
Germany is still struggling towards anti-republican
ideals.

In his grave concern more than in anything
else we must read the illusions that beset and
obsess Republican Germany under the incubus of
monarchism. 'Fhe reason is clear. The Germans
have known better and worthier days under the old
regime. The utmost that the new regime has
accomplished is something altogether negative.
More prosperity than what there was in the past
it does not promise. In fact, to many a grurnbler,
it does not promise any prosperity at all. Rings
of steel, to be manipulated by enemies or rivals or
even neutrals under the mandate of a nebulous
league of other nations, offer no clear guarantee for
a definite future. The 14 points failed her once
before in 1918, so Germany feels. They may fail
her again to-day. She may be right or she may be
wrong, but it is enough to say that that feeling
exists. What marvel then that like Cinderella
after the ball, working harder than any drudge and
for lower wage, Germany should feel her soul go
out in longing towards all that made her blest in
the glorious, but not irrevocable; past.

CHAPTER V.

In Italy:

1 . "The Grandeur that was Rome /" 2. The Tiber and the
Canges, or a lesson for the Tiber. 3 . Montecitorio, between
a drinkshop and a pawnhouse. 4 . Lazaaroni. 5 . Gyrating
corridors. 6. The perfect parliament-house within. 7. The
friendly arena, a neutral zone. 8 . The anxious deputy: Bravi
at his heels / 9 . Omniscient Press has no information I
10 . Further proof of guilt. Tanglefoot justice. 11 . The
lesson of the past. Julius Ccesar. 12 . A Bundle of Twigs.
13 . 1920 and 1925 . 14 . The Dux. 15 . Fascists and Demo-
liberals. 16 . "Legalised Fascist Illegalism." 17 . The Logic
of Force. 18 . The Fascist Creed: A Fascist State. 19 . Len-
in and Mussolini: Crossed Hammer and Sickle and Bundle of
Twigs. 20 . Comparison and contrast. 21 . Democracy on
the wheel.

The “ grandeur that was Rome ” must have
felt rather cramped and uncomfortable in having
to distribute itself unequally over seven unequal
hill-tops. The influx and growth of population has
has so surcharged the strictly limited room at its
disposal for expansion that Rome wears an eternal
look of overfulness, not to say congestion, like life
itself. And Father Tiber, to whom the Romans
rightly pray, for despite its placid flow it has
treacherous whirls and shallows, makes up in
meanderings what it lacks in width, poise and
amplitude. If it had been more mystic and
spacious and straight, the grandeur of Rome would
have extended itself along its two banks, instead
of forsaking them for the nearby hill-tops, as it
eventually did. How far the course and quality

46

of civilisation would have been altered, had the
Tiber been anothet Ganges, will remain a specula-
tion of perennial interest. Suffice * it here to
observe that barring the Palace of Justice, ,a
construction of no hoary date, and a round castle,
meant to intimidate and not enchant, no third
building rises into blue heaven from the soft
appealing meanders of the Tiber. Really, the
Tiber has done Rome less than justice. How far
the Tiber has contributed to Rome’s greatness is
not apparent at first glimpse or last. To the right,
St. Peter’s and the Vatican have given it the
widest possible berth. And to the left, all public
places have concentrated themselves on the seven
hills and left the stream severely alone. Decidedly
Rome does not seem proud of the Tiber.

Among the public buildings which are fugi-
tives to hill-tops must be classed the Italian
Chamber of Deputies or Camera dci Deputati, on
Montecitorio. One views it with a feeling of dis-
appointment tinged with a slight acid disrespect.

In spite of segregating sanitary lanes it
appears sandwiched in between a drinkshop and a
pawnhouse, pettiness to right and pettiness to left.
It boasts of no foreground or approach worth the
name, while whatever there is of frontage or
facade is sure to be overlooked because it cannot
be rightly seen. The Palace of Westminster over-
looks the cool lapping of water along a river-front
unrivalled in the world. Palais Bourbon in Paris
mirrors itself in graceful dignity in the broad-
bosomed Seine. The Reichstag-House in Berlin
rises amid the sylvan graces of a people’s pleasure
garden, the avenue and symbols of Victory spread

47

out at its feet. But this precious pile which houses
the Camera dei Deputati strikes ’you as a sordid
outcrop amon^ the lazsaroni which seem to drag
it down rather than themselves be uplifted by it.
Is this Rome indeed, you may ask with Shakes-

I^eare, and room enough for only Lassaroni?

The determined, hardworking North Italian, relic
of Alaric, exclaims : " South of Rome is Africa ! ”
There is some truth in the sting. It is the lazsaroni
spirit which un<lermined Rome's greatness in
her palmy days, the same lethargic spirit which
revels in dolcc far niente, takes its siesta, and con-
fronts you wirh a spectacle of cheap, leisured ease
which is African....

But you have no right to be harsh. It is im-
possible to provide a suitable, artificial approach
to a building on a hill-top or high ground, to which
also cluster, like grapes to vine, petty houses and
all adjuncts which go to form the habitat of the
poor. However, the impossible has been once, and
only once, achieved in the old papal summer resid-
ence on the Quirinal hill, called the Quirinale, now
the Royal Palace in Rome, which has a terraced
piazza in front and a glorious garden capping and
overhanging the escarpment behind. The Palace
of the Deputies has neither. Let us walk right up
the narrow steps.

You feel lost in the corridors which run round
and round and up and down. The stairways them-
selves are corridors which continue the gyratory
feeling. You are oppressed, and not impressed.

But the corridors are only lines of communica-
tion, and not waiting-halls. These open into the
corridors as you proceed and comprise waiting-

A8

rooms, cabinets, buffets, committee-rooms for the
several parties, the Government, the deputies,. their
families, the press and the visiting •public. There
are several floors of such rooms and cabinets
grouped round the annular corridors. It is doubt-
ful if any other parliament-house offers as many
facilities from the purely utilitarian point of vie^v.

The parliament-hall itself is a most business-
like proposition. It is arranged as an amphi-
theatre, with circular rows of seats and radial
gangways showing up the complexion and compo-
sition and allocation of the parties to perfection,
without emphasising any invidious distinction
between front-benchers and back-benchers. But
most wonderful and impressive of all is the central
arena or free space between the president’s and
orator’s tribunes and the front rows of the semi-
circularly arranged benches. This free space with
comfortable fauteuils or even a table which can be
brought in or out at will, intervenes between a
deputy’s seat and his tribune ; it mutely appeals to
sweet reasonableness ; it must surely inspire the
most intransigent with a mollifying spirit of com-
promise and give-and-take. Its very spaciousness
is a standing call for moderation. Fancy cannot
picture all the conceivable philippics which aborted
and were lost to history, while the impassioned
orator lingered over the central free-space. It is a
sort of no man’s land, a common ground, standing
on which you cannot but re-survey your own
problems or grievances through the neutral tints
of the Chamber’s and country’s best interests.

Maximum utility is the key-note of all the
arrangements here. For instance, the tiers of

49

seats do not rise abruptly into mid-heaven, one on
top of or overlapping the other as in the English
chamber, nor do they fall flat as in the German or
French ones. Acoustics and lighting are as near
practical perfection as possible. The new chamber
which is replacing the effete old construction bit
by bit, is a masterpiece from the utilitarian point
of view. This is the only one that counts in the
long run.

Contrasts are inevitable. Here a hardworked
deputy does not need to sit and shuffle in a hard
seat and stiff posture, as in the English house. Nor
need he gesticulate or exchange blows with a dear
colleague, ominously, temptingly within reach close
by, as in the French chamber. Still less need he
breathe fire and denunciation into the unwilling
ears of the whole house crowding round him as in
the German Reichstag. Easy indeed must be
parliamentary life to the Italian deputy.

But actually the onorevole deputy’s life should
be anything but a happy one. Manzoni in his
masterpiece “ I Promessi Sposi ” shows how the
bravi or desperadoes step in ruthlessly between the
betrothed ones and their marriage. Some sort of
political bravi must be also at work in the precincta
of Montecitorio, violently intervening between a
deputy’s person and his sense of duty.

Of course you do not know. You cannot
know. You cannot even presume to know. Your
Italian paper, which can instruct you to a nicety
on all the queer happenings in Tiziouzou or
Timbuctoo, maintains a perfectly judicial reserve
on that point. We do not know or do not care to
know, is what it virtually exclaims between the

S, PF

50

lines. But at times it does let itself go. And then
it serves you up i lengthy lucubration, which seems
a chapter torn out of a text-bdbk of Moral
Philosophy.

Often the bald facts, without comments or
hints, reach your ears like echoes from nowhere
in a sea-shell. Even your curiosity has no chance
of being decently roused. One Onorcvole dis-
appears without leaving a trace. Anothej is badly
beaten. A third is waylaid and just escapes with
his life. How many others incur similar risks for
their political views or speeches, they alone or their
insurance companies may be able to say. You can-
not guess. And tangle-foot enquiry is everytime
slow and probably off the track. The supreme
judges await “ further proof of guilt ”, whatever
that weighty legal phrase may imply. Some fool
makes a confession to a knave, and fool and knave
are both declared untraceable. The confession has
no judicial significance; in judicial language it does
not exist. The tangle is more mysterious than
ever, but when you take no notice of it, there is
no tangle at all. So all is for the best in the best
of all possible worlds.

Some gigantic panels in the Senate-house not
far away, which depict stirring scenes in the history
of Rome s liberties, bear the superscription :

‘ Study the Past if you would understand the
Future!” You wonder what precise stage or period
of Rome’s past you are to study to be able to
understand this uncertain and agitated present.

Julius Caesar describes in his inimitable Third
Person Singular his landing procession at Alexandria,
when the might of Rome preceded the actual

51

processionists in the shape of f^ces home by the
Uctors. The effect of those symbols of Rome’s
majesty on tfie foreign Alexandrians and the run-
aways from Rome, sheltering in Alexandria, was
anything but fortunate. Little did they care for
the ab.surd bundles of twigs and they showed it in
word and deed. It needed all Julius Csesar’s
military prowess and statesmanship and adminis-
trative skill to re-enforce respect for the bundles
of twigs and to restore them their old triumph.

Between 1920 and 1925, the bundles of twigs
have triumphed again. Never was Italy’s star so
low as in 1920. Her fortunes were at a nadir, the
emblems of her old-world greatness had been very
long forgotten, the twigs or fasces conveyed no
meaning to an Italian, literally or figuratively. The
country was steadily going Bolshevik; the Red
Flag was flying over factory and workshops, even
municipal building and public office. The govern-
ment of the day, or of the hour, was just function-
ing from hour to hour in terror and on suffer-
ance.

None but a dictator could re-organise, re-
solidarise, re-discipline the nation. At a time when
all the parties were weakly clamouring for their
rights, a tyrant was wanted in order to drill into
their jaded minds the iron sense of duty and res-
ponsibility. At the psychological moment, out of
the very ranks of the wreckers there appeared such
a dictator or leader or EHix, like a deus ex machina,
on the scene. In an easy march on Rome he
recorded a lightning, spectacular triumph, and the
powers of darkness fled before him. Drawing
inspiration from Rome’s mighty past, he restored

52

the twigs or fasces to their pristine glory as emblems
of his nation’s greatness. ,

The party of the fasces carried all before them.
It had all the brute strength, the unchecked pas-
sion, the intransigence, the fanaticism of a political
faction of the olden days. Milk-and-water liberal-
ism, misdirected communism, lost ground before it.
It re-drilled and re-disciplined the nation. Crimes
and misdeeds and blunders were committed by the
more undisciplined among it, but it pursued its
course from triumph to triumph, assimilating each
friendly faction, exterminating opposition. As the
biggest, the only vertebrate and self-conscious
party in the land, it dominated the chambers, the
political platforms, the press. It set before itself
the ideal: Identify the State with Fascism, and
Fascism with the State !

What is its position to-day? Where the
democrats and the liberals, contemptuously hy-
phenated by the Fascist press into “ Demo-liberals ”
would have recoiled in horror, the Fascists have
not hesitated to adopt terroristic and 'un-twentieth
century methods in order to consolidate their posi-
tion.

The right-hand man of their leader or Duce
claims at the present day to have “ legalised Fas-
cist Illegalism”, whatever that ominous phrase may
fully imply. He exults that his party has not hesi-
tated to curtail the freedom of the press, to suppress
its license, to end its impunity. He exults that
Fascism has found it necessary to strike at the
“ dark forces ” in the honest belief that Fjis-
cism shall not tolerate the existence of secret
societies, while Fascism itself does not (»icourage

53

6r even permit secrecy in its own deliberations.
He exults that Fascism is stamping out infidelity
from the public services. The Chamber has passed
a law, making it impossible for the servants or
dependents of the State to be anything but Fas-
cists, as experience shows that those who call them-
selves un-political, without or above party politics,
have more than once sabotaged the Fascist Revolu-
tion.

Continuing the logic of force, it is impossible
to tolerate anti-Fascist elements in the communal
administration, exactly as such elements could not
be allowed in other spheres. A project of law, in
the shape of a harmless necessary bill, has been
prepared which will make the administration Fas-
cist outright. Unless a Fascist, no one can pre-
tend to be a good Italian.

This zealot will not stop there. Fascism must
be a religion and all Fascists should be priests of
that faith. Steady pressure will be maintained on
the government in order to compel it to legalise,
adopt and activate the whole Fascist programme.
Furthermore, those renegades who traduce and
damage the country from the relative security of
a foreign shore, will be chastised as traitors. Let
not oppositionist deputies or senators rely on those
birds of ill-omen. And let those foreign nations
who employ such traitors also beware lest they be
also betrayed. Above all, let Fascists be true to
their one principle of absolute intransigence.

He concludes with the plea that Fascism is not
against the workman or the villager. In its very
origin and mainspring. Fascism is proletarian and
agrarian. Fascism was born of the people; amid

54

the travail of the people it has lived ; it has grown
in the suffering of a people ; it has worked for the
welfare of the people. Let not the p’roletarian or
agrarian child of the people consider Fascism its
enemy.

This protagonist of Fascism has spoken with
all the fervour of a neophyte. Fascism, he asserts,
is not a doctrine or pragmatism, but an elementary
historico-dynamic force, which in martyrdom and
self-sacrifice has faced and conquered the growing
despotism of the Reds. Fascism has identified it-
self with the State and given a new basis to the
State and a new meaning to citizenship. Too long
has that sorry little farce or carnival of demo-
liberalism gone on, which allowed every renegade
or charlatan to escape to a friendly, foreign country,
and from the relative safety of its shores to con-
tinue a campaign of vilification and abuse and
financial strangulation of the mother-land. Too
long have the demo-liberals flirted with nebulous
rights of democracy and liberty, while they have
easily forgotten the iron duties which those very
rights impose. It is ludicrous to imagine that a
person should be allowed all the rights of Italian
citizenship, the right to live in peace, the right to
be defended by Italy’s laws at home, by her arms
abroad, through the mere fact of the entry of his
name in the birth-register. It is more than
ludicrous, it is criminal, to allow such a person to
work against his country’s best interests from the
safe refuge of a foreign shore. Unless he is a
Fascist, he is no Italian, and being no Italian he
must forfeit all his rights at home and abroad.

Such is the position at the present day. From

55

the intransigence of Fascism in Italy to the intran-
sigence of Communism in Russia there is but one
easy step, ahhough the two are poles asunder.
Two ideals rule the world of politics, two symbols
strive for mastery : The ideal of Lenin, having for
symbol, crossed hammer and sickle, and the ideal
of Mussolini ‘having for symbol a few twigs of
antiquity.

The few twigs are at one pole; the crossed
hammer, and sickle, at the other. Between these
two poles or extremes, all the patch-work parties
and motley governments of modern Europe live,
move and have their being. Between them every
bloc, governmental or anti-governmental, may be
easily ranged and co-ordinated. Parliamentary
institutions have lost their supremacy, their
individuality, their very basis. They are amor-
phous, decadent, servile bodies, hopelessly at the
mercy of the powers of the day, — to be petted and
pampered if they carry out their master’s com-
mands, or to be ignored or re-fashioned if they do
not. Italian parliaments, as is boastfully claimed,
register and legalise Fascist decrees. The Russian
bodies are equally manacled. Parliaments are so
constituted that they have to obey higher orders,
whether they emanate from a Grand Council of
Fascists, or a Secret Council of Commissars.

There are obvious points of contact between
the extreme types of autocratic or dictatorial
states. Each claims to have saved the country, the
one from aggressive Toreigpi states, the other from
internecine civil war. Each has drilled and dis-
ciplined the individual, curtailed his rights, added
to his responsibilities. No Italian is an Italian,

56

unless he is a Fascist, no Russian is a Russian to a
Russian, unless he^ is a Communist. The granite
basis of Italy is agriculture ; that of Russia is like-
wise agriculture. And here the comparison ends.

While both countries have sacrificed parlia-
mentary institutions, Italy has achieved, under
Fascism, as its dearest enemies must concede, an
industrial expansion which is a miracle to those
who knew her five years ago. But Communist
Russia is as far backward as ever. Fascism has
restored Italy’s prestige in the markets, the cafis,
the chancelleries of Europe and the world.
Russia’s credit was never so low, as at the present
day. And yet despite such feverish activity, the
Italian Lira is as low as ever. Now, we ask, what
use is industrial expansion when its main index in
the oounting-houses of the world, the watered lira,
is no better than the Russian Chervonets ? That
is a cry of despair.

It leads to others : What use is the sacrifice
of the individual to the state be that state indus-
trialised or mercantile or militarist or communist,
or fascist? And going down to bed-rock, does the
state exist for the citizen, or the citizen for the
state?

These are problems awaiting solution not
to-day, but for all time. But what is to happen
to parliamentary institutions and their fine spirit
of democracy while the clash of world-forces is
evolving a solution of those problems?

Time alone can, and will, answer. Meanwhile
the conclusion must be drawn that in Communist
Russia democracy is a spectre. In Fascist Italy,
democracy is on the wheel..

CHAPTER VI.

In Geneva:

1 . Alps, Island, Lake, Stvans, Yourself, 2 . Genevans Inter-
nationals — Fugitives from gods a^td governments, 3 . Voltaire,
the First International, 4, Rousseau, the Second IntemationaL
5 . Rousseau's Isle, Geneva's heart and soul, 6 . The Palace
of Internationalism, league against league, 7, Genesis of the
League of Nations: an afterthought, 8 . The damned on
earth and the great tin-damned, 9. An International Confer-
ence, 10 . Group meetings, 11 . Unpolitical fetes,
12 . Boredom and its tsvo causes, 13 . Terrible Interpreters,
14 . All begins and ends in smoke ! 15 . The Fricasse of
speeches, 16 . The High Contending Parties, 17 . Breezes
and Scenes: A backward country. An advanced country, A
recalcitrant country. Two neighbouring countries, A distress-
ful country, 18 . The Jolly Beggars' Opera, 19 . Bakers and
babies, 20 . Hardworked delegates, 21, The Mecca of the
Mighty and the Babel of Babblers,

The canopy of snow-capped Alps, pleasantly near
enough on clear days, but invisible in the dust or haze ;
the silver-gray carpet of a lake big enough to be a sea ;
a little oval island bearing tall trees and a squat statue
set like emerald in an arm of the sea-like lake ; palatial
but uninspired box-like houses which dominate the
water-front; and fussy swans floating double, swan
and shadow, across the still image of the belt of houses
mirrored in the water ; and yourself, indeed most of all
yourself, beak-nosed foreigner in quest of adventure
— these are the essential marks, if not the main ingre-
dients, of modern international Geneva.

Geneva has always aspired to be international;
or if not, the freaks of fortune have thrust

58

internationalness upon it. And, anyhow, it has the
repute of offering* asylum to all who are fugitives
from gods and governments alike. Such asylum may
not always be offered, but it is always consistently
taken and enjoyed. A cure in Geneva is as inspiring
to the political outcaste, as a sojourn in Rome is to
the passionate pilgrim. The white-topped Alps pro-
tect and re-assure; the melting lake makes a welcom-
ing gesture. 1'he City Fathers have wrung their
liberties from pontiffs, kings and tyrants, and prizes
dearly bought are always amply enjoyed. No wonder
that the hopeless, lost or losing causes of the earth
have made Geneva their second home.

A little French lawyer’s son was exiled from his
native land; befriended, and then banished by a royal
patron in Berlin ; helped and then forgotten by a pub-
lisher in Holland ; arrested and tortured by the police
for the alleged theft of a king’s poems. . He drifted
homeless across half Europe, he — the acknowledged
champion of the wronged of all lands. Geneva offered
him a home. The Free City of Geneva feared not
princes, prelates or kings. That was Geneva’s First
International. Geneva made Voltaire, and Voltaire
made the French Revolution.

Another one of the world’s Vast Disinherited,
Rousseau, found a home and refuge in Geneva.
Gazing at the statue of that squat, expressionless in-
dividual in the heart of the islet bearing his name, you
wonder to yourself and ask ;

Was this the man that overturned false idols, and
set up new ideals in education, statecraft, philosophy?

Was this the face which frowmed on the follies of
society, till it shamed them out of existence?

59

Was his the voice which counselled and preached
“ Return to Nature ! ” to a misunderstanding people,
who answered with ridicule and taking him too literally
affected to go on all fours with an unwashed carrot in
their mouth?

He looks all so inconsequential and incongruous
and absurd. So puny! Yet that one over yonder,
overlooking a herbaceous border and surveying just
as puny cygnets drawing streaks across the clear water,
that is Rousseau, the father of Lassales and Marxes
and Lenins, the Second International. View him
well, “ Ce sublime corrupteur ! ” whom even to-day
gawky little demagogues at the far end of the globe
misread and misquote to each other’s olwious con-
fusion.

Rousseau has made no paltry dime-in-the-slot
revolution ; no sudden change in pomps and shows and
circumstance ; no tinkering with forms or phases or
fashions. He worked deep, and still works deeper in.
He is the ferment which is acting, and will continue
acting on the worlds of thought and feeling, of politics,
sociology and culture. For Rousseau, in the words
of a heroic poet,

" Ira fertiliser, de ses restes immondes,

“ Les sillons de I’espace oft fcrmentent les
mondes I ”

Rousseau’s Isle is the heart and soul of Geneva.
Out of sight of Rousseau stands the Palace of Inter-
nationalism. It is a thing of recent growth, almost an
excrescence, largely an after-thought. Why an after-
thought, you ask? If the damned on earth, the scare-
crows of hunger, the disinherited of their nations, the
landless of all lands, can combine and group themselves
into international brotherhoods and parade with cross

€0

and banner, why not also the bourgeois and the bureau-
crat, the inarticulate middle class and the tongue-tied
civil servant, the businessman and the property-holder
as well ? Why'not all the classes and all the nations of
the world? Why not should the whole world band
itself into an organisation for the defence of its rights
and the redress of its wrongs?

The ideal of a fraternal league of nations has
broken many hearts, not the least that of the kindly,
unworldly teacher from the West, who collapsed under
its spell.

But let us return to the reality; An International
Conference is billed for session in Geneva. The local
hostelries, some of which even promise private baths
and running water, are agog with expectation.
Strange-Iooking frisures, tonsures, complexions, strike
the eye. How these exotic individuals, monocled or
be-spectacled or neither, but all equally puffed and
pompous, bear themselves nobly as they glide along
the asphalt! How they brush past the unhygienic
Genevans, who with dropped jaws and white-upturned
eyes stand indifferently to attention, and then follow
them with looks which are probably more eloquent and
certainly more safe than words !

Are not these birds of passage worthy of their
gorgeous plumage? Are they not the pick of their
lands? Do they not represent their magistrates, their
soldiers, their judges, their police and of course their
peoples also? They are Excellencies, "Their Excel-
lencies" all, and rightly called so by right, or

courtesy or fashion, we will not pause to enquire.

Such newborn “ Excellencies ” are the models of
propriety and self-consciousness. But for a robust
physique and well-arched spine, they would bend double

61

under the weight of their mandates, those imponderable
burdens which they are to carry nigbt and day, waking
or sleeping, walking or talking. This is no matter for
mirth, but for serious sympathy. Journalists are enter-
prising even in Europe. Curiosity-seekers, whether
they take the form of gouty old men taking a hope-
less cure in the same hotel or whether they assume the
flimsy, exiguous raiment of a huntress of fortune, are
so Impetuous, so obtrusive, so dull-witted and thick-
skinned. They just will not be denied. There should
be no cause for surprise if even the stone-walls of
snobbishness fail to prove impregnable to assaults from
such hardened climbers. And snobbishness ? There is
much virtue in snobbishness. But for it all barriers
of society, of vanity, of wealth, would collapse and
crumble to pieces. The barriers of caste, in compari-
son, are mere walls of a child's castle in the sand. , . .

The Grand International Conference is at last
in session. You are perched in a salient seat in a
corner of the very spacious, wide, empty gallery.
An empty gallery! It only proves what an un-
imaginative, backward race the Genevans must be.
Some people do not realise their own blessings
until they lose them. If it were proposed to trans-
fer an international conference to Capri or Corfu
or Crete, not to mention hospitable Hibernia, every
Genevan would hold up five-fingered hands in
horror! Why should Geneva have the pick of the
world’s intellect and the world's wealth, say the
envious of other likely places. Geographically,
Ireland would be a centre of gravity, to which
delegates from East and West and North and South
should gravitate with a minimum of discomfort
and displacement. But . for the moment the

62

thoughtless Genevan does not bother himself about
filling an inviting', empty seat with his capacious
person.

But watch the floor below: Excellencies with
their assistants and advisors and secretaries and
staffs have spread themselves out in their fauteutls,
each behind his appropriate desk. These desks are
arranged in spacious semi-circles off the base-line
which bears the presidential tribune in the centre
and minor officials’ bureaux to either side.

There is a buzz of dignified whisper, without
any vulgar sign of undue animation.

The President, what a venerable kindly look-
ing gentleman! Fit father of such a brilliant as-
semblage of the spirits of the age, he commands
universal respect and obedience. He emerges from
the forest of papers lying in idle sheaves around
him ; picks one out after mature consideration ;
stands up; gives a preliminary rap to the table to
disengage general attention from the little pools
and eddies of idle chatter; addresses himself to read
from the paper he holds so lovingly in his hand;
and. . . .he sits down again! He has picked up the
wrong paper.

Ten fingers rummage through the papers of
all sizes littered on the desk before him. Helpful
attendants from the adjacent benches join in the
active search or follow it with anxious eyes. The
president at last discovers his copy of the agenda,
stands up again, and in the language of his own
choosing reads out the first item.

The business of the house proceetis at a brisk
pace. Two-thirds of the house does not under-
stand the langptage used in the proceedings; the

63

remaining one-third is rather tired of the imagina-
tive interpreter who interprets vfrith all the license
denied to a poet, and at times improves the hesi-
tative attributes of the original in the process. All
are anxious to get through the proceedings, which
are formal to a degree. Speaking and voting by
show of hands alternate as if worked by clock-
work. Broad, colourless, innocuous points of prin-
ciple, mistermed, declarations are taken up, ap-
praised, thrown open for general discussion, ex-
posed to any possible opposition (of course, not!)
accepted by show of hands in detail, ratified by
show of hands in the lump, and the Chamber dis-
solves itself like fondant in an eager child’s fingers
into the various little groups of likely persons,
possessing competence for working out the prac-
tical details that are necessary. As the number of
likely persons is limited, the rest of the house has
no choice but to adjourn to a long enough date, till
the competent group should put up the cut and dry
proposals for ratification. Here we take leave of
the plenary sessionists and follow the group in its
activities.

Excellencies and all disperse in the words of the
chansonnier:

“ Et la seance jut levee,

Et ces messieurs
Et ces mesieurs
S’en sont alles
Bras dessous, bras desstts,

Au dijeuner !

They are gone, but they have left behind, like foot-
prints in the sands of time, groups or commissions or
committees. These are minor bodies who have to

64

continue the real business. What they deliberate and
decide and finally ’propose in silence and tears. — for
they work in camera, without gallery or •pressmen, and
their multi-lingual wrangles must be bringing them to
the verge of tears — the conference in plenary sitting
will accept and ratify.

Such a group is dominated or fathered by a few
outstanding figures who turn up year after year like
hardy annuals, and find in Geneva a home from home.
They may or may not be experts but they are wonder-
ful knights of the table. The first requisite in diplo-
matic service, and still more in its adoptive sister inter-
national service, is not a good tongue, but a good
appetite. A dyspeptic diplomat toying with zwieback
at the festive spread of a banquet table will not carry
the same conviction as the florid one, who gives full
play to his knife and fork. Hence a group commis-
sioner will collect at his own festive board such others
whose opinions require moulding or correction or
direction, and between two courses many an intricate
problem may find an easy solution. Unpolitical dinners
at which no speeches are made end as the most political
dinners possible. Instead of waste of good warm
words on a crowd in collective speaking, there is that
individual appeal or coaching or canvas, which no
obduracy can long survive.

When these carefully planned and rehearsed
impromptu feasts prepare a genial atmosphere, and
postprandial causeries prepare congenial opinions, the
course of the group meeting the following morning
becomes plain, plain to the point of boredom.

This boredom may arise from two causes : When
the drama has been carefully rehearsed, the actual per-
formance is lacking in surprises. There is nothing

65

so boring as letting or watching the obvious take its
course^

But the second cause has got to be seen in opera-
tion to be fully appreciated. Imagine a group of 30
meimbers whose mother-tongues are English, French,
German, Italian, Spanish. To be fully representative
such a group should also comprise members speaking
Russian, Chinese, Japanese, etc. If these members
come from the higher-cducated-classes of their coun-
tries, English, French, German would be intelligible to
all. But if their respective proletariats are also going
to be included in the representative group, then there
will be much confusion of speech. For a worker
from South America will insist on speaking and hear-
ing vSpanish, a worker from Russia, Russian. More
interpreters will then be pressed into service. And any
interpreter who so steps in forms a barrier between
question and answer, speech and speech, interjection
and reply, point of order and explanation, and so on
ad infinitum.

Now interpreters have thankless jobs to do and
they do them badly. If scrupulously correct and faith-
ful, their rendering is slow, heavy, pedantic, almost
nonsensical. If they render liberally and give their
fancy the reins, or in the brief time at their disposal
boil down the original to its main points, they intro-
duce an element of uncertainty and liveliness into the
proceedings which does not quite make for co-opera-
tion. In either case they try tempers, waste time,
fetter the free course of, deliberation. Traduttore i
traditoref' says the Italian, and what is true of the
painstaking translator in his study is still more true
of the slipshod interpreter in a hurry. And then the
long waits between speech and speech, or question and

s, PF S

66

reply, or proposal and acceptance, are a weariness of
the flesh. Patient suffering members do not express
it in words, they express it in smoke. ’The committee
room is plastered with layer on layer of tobacco smoke
in which the nobler blends are obliterated by the baser.
Blue smoke, gray smoke, any smoke will do. Watch
it drifting in curious, languorous coils and curls
through the thick, heavy, dope-bound air of the room.
It is easily possible that members sitting far apart may
fail to see or recognise each other should either or
both be wearing glasses. Heaven help the non-
smoker in such gloom !

Half the period of its session, such a group meet-
ing is a slow-smoking competition. The remaining half
is an example how the same platitude may be clothed
in different languages without gaining freshness.

Either performance ends in boredom. But
boredom is better than murder. For if any enthu-
siastic .speaker, whom you now see mentally resting
on his oars after having gracefully steered himself
through polished periods and topical allusions and
trenchant paradoxes and suave sentimentalism, were
to follow his wayward self-willed interpreter through
his revised version in which all the dainty or effective
or arresting trappings of speech are flung aside like
rubbish, delicate points slurred over or blunted or
misplaced, and the general sense reproduced in the
minimum of words chosen in a hurry, — why, then,
the author of the original speech would just murder
the fellow who is mangling it. But he does not know
it, and there is peace. How quiet is Geneva despite
such open incitements to breaches of the peace !

As to the original speeches themselves, a polyglot
person would compare them to a jig-saw puzzle, in

which none of the original pieces can be made to fit in
at any. point. Between speech and ‘speech there is no
logical sequencb, no organic growth, no inter-connec-
tion. Carefully doctored, and abbreviated, and edited
for the press, they subsequently read like jewels of
logic and lucidity. But as they fall from the speakers’
lips and are picked up by willing ears, they fail to
convince.

Conflicts of opinion would arise more frequently
and acutely but for the long lapses of time, and the
interpreters’ interludes, and the thick pall of smoke,
which screens the High Contending Parties.

Despite adventitious aids to peace, breezes and
scenes are at times inevitable.

A backward country is for laying down a prin-
ciple ; an advanced country is for rushing into realities
and details.

A recalcitrant country is accepting a principle for
others, with reservations for itself.

Two neighbouring countries, full of neighbourly
hate, are attitudinising over a minor point of detail,
having obviously in view the ulterior object of paying
off old scores.

A distressful country will strike a novel chord in
the chorus by asking for relief, and thereby threaten
to turn a solemn international meeting into a Jolly
Beggars’ Opera!

But the solemn sobriety of the proceedings will
be stultified in another form. The comic will break
through when least expected or wanted. Imagine half
a hundred delegates who have come from all quarters
of the globe gravely deliberating whether bakers shall
bake bread in night hours, — a question of no conceiv-
able interest whatever to the major portion of the

68

world's population. What is the fruit of your
labours on my behalf?" asks rice-eating Japan of its
delegate who has spent half a fortune ih putting half a
girdle round the world, in order to go and sit and
deliberate in Geneva : ‘‘ Shall there be night labour in
bakeries?" And the delegate replies: *'We have
decided to abolish night labour in bakeries ! " But the
climax comes in the bakeries themselves, when the
bakers decline to be treated like babies and put to bed
at sunset!

Waste of energy; waste of money; waste of
opportunity.

Geneva has two roles. It is the Mecca of the
Mighty. A few strong men come to Geneva year
after year like hardy annuals and shape the course of
opinion, of debate, of consultative legislation. These
are the mighty, who pull the strings.

Geneva is also a Babel for babblers. A polyglot
crowd of sightseers conies from all over the world.
They have opportunities of self-education and self-
advertisement. They miss neither. Then they talk
of principles, ideals, utopias. Such is the Babel of
babblers.

When a schemer and a talker are yoked together,
the net result of their joint labours will be shuffle,
evasion, procrastination, delay. Shall such-and-such
ex-enemy member use his native language ? The ques-
tion will go a-begging from committee to committee
for reply, and by the time a clear reply is received the
necessity therefor shall have totally disappeared.
Again, shall so-and-so sit as labour's representative?
The question will be referred to one authority, exa-
mined by a second, answered by a third, referred to

the country of so-and-so’s origin by a fourth, and so
on.

More evasion, less delay. For whatever is well
done is done quickly enough.

Governments may come and governments may go,
but their countries last for ever. So these interna-
tional excursions to Geneva will never come to a full
stop. The mighty shall come to Mecca; the babblers
babble on in Babel.

CHAPTER VII.

In Utopia:

1. Utopia, the land of every man’s desire I 2. Realism and
ideals. 3. The five dissipants of parliamentary energy in
Hurope. 4. Utopia for Prance. S. Utopia for Bngland.
6. Utopia for Germany. 7. Utopia for Italy. 8. Epilogue.
Parliaments in chains. A perfectible Parliament.

Utopia is the land of every man’s desire, including
the deputy’s. A long way down his manifestoes and
mandates and addresses, at the very bottom of his
expressed and unexpressed ideals in politics you will
see the faint lights of Utopia, of the Utopia which he
calls and feels his own.

“ Here, and nowhere else,” exclaims the realist,
“ is my America ! ” “ Here, and everywhere, is my
Utopia ! ” exclaims the idealist.

The force of idealism in politics cannot be con-
veyed in words, or figures, or signs. But idealism
ruled the world never more strongly than to-day.
Reconstructing Europe is not an idle pastime of poli-
ticians, but a living reality. And there can be no
effective or complete reconstruction of Europe unless
and until its parliaments begin to function as inde-
pendent bodies and realise what they are: keepers of
the national conscience, a focus of national activity, a
clearing-house of ideas, and moulds for ideals.

Interpellation and interrogation and denunciation
and intimidation and evasion, which are the leading
clogs on progress in the chambers of France, England,

71

Germany, Italy and Geneva respectively, must all be
recognised as dissipants of collective energy, and kept
under proper control.

That is not to say, for instance, that an interpel-
lation is an evil or a nuisance in itself. Often the
balance of the political machine, which is the govern-
meni, cannot be righted except tlmough an interpella-
tion. But the honourable deputies of the French
chamber have still to learn and apply two clear prin-
ciples : ( 1 ) It is easier to destroy a bloc than to create
it. (2) It is better to let the other fellow do your work
than do it yourself.

The first principle will be accepted in theory, but
how to apply it in practice ? Blocs are very amorphous,
nebulous things. Experience alone will teach you
how to rely on them, how to utilise them. And then
the experience with each bloc has to be learnt afresh,
and then totally unlearnt as soon as that bloc has col-
lapsed like a soap-bubble. Soap-bubble politics can be
easily pursued in the French chamber. It is natural
to excitable dilettantes, and youthful iconoclasts, and
even wiser men let themselves be unduly swayed by
personalities and emotions. How, then, to avoid such
superficial soap-bubble politics? The Latin tempera-
ment rejoices in shams and scenes and crises, which it
accepts in the spirit of a grown-up baby. Infixity of
purpose and want of stability and of continuity in one’s
policy do more harm in the long run than is apparent
at first glance to the naked eye. Where else, except
in France with her characteristic levity, would it be
possible that while the whole country is working at
fever-heat its financial strength is being wasted over
frivolities and actually undermined by purposeless
panderings to political amateurism? It cannot evoi be

n

pretended that there are no financial experts in France.
That thrifty little liation of thrifty little hard-working,
hard-earning, hard-headed rentiers and ’petty farmers
was, before the war, a model to the whole world of
that very financial salubrity, " assainissement financier,"
for which she is now crying as she would for the moon.
That was not the work of experts, real or bogus, but
the cumulative effect of the hard training each frugal
Frenchman had received in the school of everyday life.
But to-day the contrast baffles understanding.

If work is at all a blessing in life and a sure stabi-
lising factor in international trade, how is it that the
franc of hard-worked, in fact over-worked, France is
worth less than one-fifth of the shilling of England
with its heavy unemployment list? The contrast
becomes still more glaring if it is remembered that
England has a very heavy outcrop of industrial troubles,
while France, on the contrary, employs a vast body of
foreign labour drawn from the so-called labour colo-
nies, foreign labourers being actually settled in those
colonies on an indenture system with every prospect
of providing their adoptive country with a sound and
sturdy, hard-working, clear-thinking proletariat. Our
wonder and pity at the financial chaos grows deeper
as we look round. The once debased German mark
can hold its head high, at parity with the proud English
shilling. Even the Russian Chervonetz which has still
more dubious antecedents than the German mark, is a
lusty brute compared with the effete franc, which the
rival politico-financiers are crushing out of existence.
This should not be. France which paid the heavy in-
demnities to Germany in the ’seventies, and which
endured the attritive strain of the World War like no
other nation, should be not incapable of the relatively

73

slight act of self-sacrifice required in rejuvenating the
franc, When the rentier has swallowed the camel
which was the* repudiation of her debts by Russia, why
should he strain at the gnat, which would be the repu-
diation of some increasingly worthless paper by his
own country ? The Chervonetz has a long lease of life
because it stands with two feet on the firm soil of core-
sound, agrarian Russia, the same old Russia of the
bulging corn-bins which floated as in a mirage before
the fascinated gaze of even veteran politicians. Russia
was the granary of Europe and she can produce enough
to re-conquer her economic world-importance. France
was the banker of Europe and she can produce enough
healthy money through the sweat of her brows, where*-
with to finance her old debtors. But that is apparently
not to be.

Almost in despair you may turn round and ask:
Why does she not burn up all the dirty debased scraps
of paper, which pass for currency, and recreate a
veritable franc-or, redeemable to the last cent in hard,
ringing gold, and not hypothecated in a hundred and
one risky ways? In a crisis, once, Danton counselled
to his compatriots: “ De Vaudace, encore de Vaudace,
tou jours de Vaudace!” Is there not one deputy who
will give the same advice to the chamber, and show
the way by acting upon it himself? No other’ way can
save France from financial ruin, for chaos there is
already. There is not a deputy but recognises the
imperious needs of the situation, but for obvious
reasons all are lacking in courage to meet and face
them. They would sooner go on making blocs to-day
and breaking blocs to-morrow, than put their shoulders
to the wheel of the coach of state and help it out of the
financial morass in which it is engulfed.

74

This brings us to the second principle : Better let
the other fellow do your work than do it yourself.
This may savour of indolence but it is. the height of
policy. Apply it thus:

Let any bloc, howsoever constituted, work out a
definite financial policy and help it through thick and
thin to do so. There can be only one such healthy
policy and no second, if we overlook minor differences
of detail. Work such a policy assiduously to its end.
What does it matter to you whether Duval or Dumont
gets the credit? If credit is cheaply earned, you can
not begrudge it. But if it is really great, the more
will it redound to France’s honour and your own.

It may sound incongruous and absurd to call upon
one deputy to help another, his enemy, human nature
being what we see. But if a radical and a monarchist
deputy have stood shoulder to shoulder in a common
trench through mud, fire, water, gas and death for
four long years, surely they can vote on a common
programme for a few days or weeks only. To prepare
the way one must separate finance from politics, which
is perfectly feasible. If two deputies can sit together
round an apiritif in the same cafe, for their ' personal
relaxation, they can also sit together for a brief while
for the country's benefit on a financial commission.
What is wanted is very little: just a lofty moral
gesture. Is that asking for too much in the face of
a day-to-day triumph of mediocrity?

And England — mad old, sad old, bad old England !
We still confess like Wordsworth : “ With all thy
faults, I love thee still ! ” England, the mistress of
half creation, the arbitress of all, and yet a stranger in
her own house. England, the land of yellow fog, sour

75

paradoxes and green experts, England is a Utopia
marred in the making.

England’s problems defy solution. It is doubtful
if they have been fully understood by those best
qualified to know. No wonder she is making a wild
gesture of despair. See her on your map, how she is
kicking Ireland out of her way, shaking the clammy
coils of Scotland like a loose turban off her head, and
heading for a plunge in the Atlantic.

On the English House of Commons sits a heavy
responsibility, if it is to do its duty by the English
people. It is to undo the wrong caused by the frenzied
industrialisation of the country, and to restore the
inner economic balance. It must atone for the evils
which have been accumulating for a century, evils
which have grown in virulence thanks to its own
supineness and lack of vision. There have been sins
of omission and commission.

In England, the “ Merrie England ” of romance
and Utopia, while the mercantile state was being
moulded, and the country industrialised, a physically
strong, spiritually healthy peasantry was heedlessly,
needlessly, ceaselessly torn from the soil, dumped into
clay-boxes of factories, given soul-killing mechanical
operations, and left to grow into automata together
with the machines which it helped to keep in perpetual
motion.

Goldsmith was a true prophet when he said:

“III fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,

Where wealth accumulates and men decay."

In the mechanistid order of things which ruled in
England for a century and is still going strong, trade
has accumulated out of all proportion, but the decay
in men has been nonetheless acute and certain. The

76

stop-gap remedies or palliatives that have been proposed
from time to time under the euphemism of benefits for
workers will expose that decay convincingly. General
relief, insurance, garden colonies, sanatoria, homes,
etc., etc., are all halting remedial schemes which are
devised to stop the rot and decay in men; attractive
projects for co-partnership, big bonuses, short hours
are meant to save their flagging spirits from the daily
grind ; but the evil has a deeper seat or focus, and has
not even been fully recognised, let alone countered with
success.

While the old rustic lived on the land, with the
land, for the land, his industrialised descendant is living
on sticky margarine, watered beer and doctored air,
with all the tools of his complete enslavement as a
machine among machines, for percentages, dividends
and balance-sheets.

For the old healthy revelry and horseplay of a
fair in Bideford or Donnybrook, the industrialist state
has substituted strikes and lockouts, cuts in wages,
short hours, visible or invisible blackleg labour, and the
general killing uncertainty of everyday life. It is an
arguable point whether the Lyddite machine-wreckers’
failure was not a setback to civilization in the long run
and widest sense of the term.

Agriculture, too, has not prospered due to the
withering influence of industry. That agriculture can
be a profitable and elevating industry even in this
twentieth century, let the sturdy little French farmer
testify. In independence and spiritual strength, the
agriculturist, however neglected and decried, is still an
easy first. The Russian Bolshevist has not broken his
spirit; the French Government is afraid of him; the
German Reich owes him its financial salvation.

V

Here in England agriculture is not a blessing, but
a problem. England is fast becoming a land of
problems. Atid one more or less does not seem to
weigh upon the national conscience or its 600
keepers who sit on their hard seats in the House of
Commons. Their problems, like the poor, are always
with them. They think in decimals and percentages,
ponder over palliatives and sedatives, and can hardly
be expected to cope with the evil of a century when
enough unto the day is the evil thereof.

But England’s Utopia is at her door. She has
only to send some one out and seize it and rig up the
Union Jack. It is more profitable than ice-flows,
paddy-fields or sandy wastes.

What is this Utopia, and how shall it be reached?
A few sharp consistent strokes of policy will take us
there, provided that the House has the will-to-do and
the soul-to-dare. Industry must be restored to the
soil, and the soil restored to its universal place or pre-
eminence. There is no need to nationalise the one or
the other. Nationalisation is only a change of labels
and does no conceivable good, and may do- real harm.
In stifling private initiative, for instance, a pushful
fellow may be converted into a drone. If the lessons
of Regie enterprises in Latin countries were not
sufficient foretaste of failure before the war, the plight
of nationalised industry in Russia teaches a sure enough
lesson now.

As our Utopian advice to France with her depre-
ciated currency was to burn up all her paper money,
so our radical remedy for the economic ills of England
is to break up the land. Once the land is fragmented
it will go back to those to whom it most belongs, and
a stout healthy English yeomanry will emerge from

78

the collapse of the landed aristocracy of the day. Thus
the decay of agricultural families will be automatically
stopped. *

But that is not enough. Work on land should be
given pride of place. Let every apprentice in a factory,
in fact every factory hand, be drawn from such a
reconstituted agricultural family. Let him serve at
least three years on the soil before he is taken into a
factory. And let the term of labour in a factory not
exceed a fixed period of years at a stretch.

Such interwelding of industry and agriculture is
not a flight of fancy, but an economic necessity for
England, circumstanced as she now is.

The industrialist may object: Why do you take
away my best people when they are learning to be
dexterous at their jobs?

Our answer is very simple : If a state can enforce
conscription and call up every able-bodied male for
three years’ military service with the colours, surely
that state can still more easily enforce a like period of
private service on the soil. It may be argued that the
military needs are paramount. Equally and more
emphatically, we urge that the vital needs are still more
paramount. The former subserve only the material
side of national life; the latter, the conservation and
improvement of the nation and all that life stands for.
These two vital needs of the nation are at present
wholly neglected. Labour, especially factory labour,
has got to be spiritualised, or, if you prefer the term,
de-materialised. This will not be achieved by wander-
ing priests or peripatetic cinema-men, or by garden-
colonies, or by excursions into the country or seaside,
or by university extension lectures, or by addresses
from statesmen however eminent.

79

No. The only spiritualising force in the land is
the land.

Let each machine-made worker realise that he can
escape to the land not for a few hours, no, but for a
few years, and then he will thrill with a feeling of
love for that hitherto elusive and unknown being
" Mother England.” There is not a Frenchman but
thrills with love for “ La Douce Franc,” which to him
is a cottage standing on a bit of land, where he can
grow his whole dinner from meat to cheese. An
Italian returns after long years of hard, foreign
labour to his native country, and there he spends the
evening of his life on the soil. Let the English
worker also feel that he is not an alien in England.
He does not want arbitration boards, but the land of
his birth.

Honourable members of the House of Commons
have to disengage their minds from such cobwebs as
restricted output, shorter hours, living wage, etc., etc.,
and go down to bedrock as has been shown above.
When the law assured them shorter hours and day
labour, the bakers of Paris in solemn meeting assem-
bled, entered a spirited prote.st, and demanded relief
from enforced idleness, contending that they were not
babies to be put to bed with the setting of the sun.
Bakers are not orators, but the sight of these toilers
of the night, kneading the air in angry gesture as they
argued for liberty of labour, carried more conviction
than mere words. Other fallacies are equally flimsy.
No ; the House of Commons cannot be a real House
of Commons so long as its distinguished members do
not cudgel their brains and tackle deep-seated problems
at the root itself, instead of playing upon their surface-
effects in futile triumphs of suavity.

And Germany? Is there anywhere on this planet
a Utopia for Germany? If so, where?

If Austria was a geographical concept, Germany
is a tribal fetish: so said and say their detractors.
Perhaps they have a semblance of reason. Germany’s
best rallying cries, miscalled songs, go back to tribal
epochs :

Als der Romer, frech geworden, sim serim sim
sim sim sim.

Germany is also a land of philosophers, who have
continued a quest for their philosopher’s stone, in the
shape of eternal peace. Kant, the expert on Pure
Reason, explored all the paths to eternal peace. His
brochure on the subject is very dreary reading, but in
his peculiarly labyrinthine style he writes with an air
of masterly finality. Had he lived long enough he
would have realised that there is a recipe for eternal
peace, not to be found in his philosopher’s wallet.

Germany has found it to-day. It consists of three
D’s : Defeat ; Disarmament ; Drudgery.

It is a sublime irony of fate that Germany which
before the war was the ncc plus ultra, the dernier cri,
in efficient administration, should now be regarded and
treated as an excrescence on Europe, classable with
mandated territory in the wilds of Africa or in the
solitudes of the South Seas. This acute contrast is
apt to be overlooked in a hurry. Before 1914 eminent
statesmen were proud to claim Germany as their spiri-
tual home, and now “ lies she there, and none so poor
to do her reverence.” Before the war German arts
and crafts, science and philosophy held a place of
unchallenged pre-eminence in the regard of the world.
Now the repute of German learning is so low that an
aspirant to a minor French diploma has tO' suppress

the fact that he t8 a German Doctor. International
conferences in medicine and radioing, aeronautics and
technology sit fn solemn silence with wiseacres hailing
from remote and backvfard parts of the globe, while
Germany which once peremptorily claimed a place in
the sun is deemed to have forfeited her usual place on
this earth. Prejudices die hard, especially those based
on propaganda.

Within an iron ring of prejudice, swelled by pro-
p ^ g^ nda. Germany is realising Utopia, a Utopia of her
own, which none may dispute with her. It rests on a
tripod of three D’s, the D’s of Defeat, Disarmament,
Drudgery. What are they?

Before 1914, the Imperial War Museum in Berlin
was a-glitter with trophies of the last three European
wars. To-day, it is gaunt and desolate except for a
few antiques. That is Defeat.

Before 1914, the German uniform excited the
veneration of the old and the envy of the young, and
the adulation of the fair sex. To-day it provokes
derisive reproach. That is Defeat.

Before 1914, a single German Schutzmann equip-
ped with pickelhaube, cutlass and revolver, kept the
peace in a whole quarter from the crossing of its two
central roads, such was his unchallenged prestige. To-
day that prestige has sunk so low that communistically
minded workmen break the peace where and how they
please, under the very eyes of a pale-faced, hollow-
chested, dispirited flunkeydom miscalled gendarmerie.
That is Defeat.

The second element in Germany's eternal peace is
Disarmament. This, too, is an accomplished fact, like
defeat.

s, PF

6

82

German nationals are driven out of ex-German
territory, re-arran^ed as internationalised cities, .plebis-
cite areas, Polish corridors, etc., by * snarling little
nationalities, wreaking a long-deferred vengeance on
the colossus lying helpless at their feet, and Germany
may not even show her teeth in resentment. She bas
no teeth. They have all been drawn. That is Dis-
armament.

If Russia’s Guardians of the Revolution — quaint
and misleading title for Red soldiery intended to^^^.
flung against neighbouring states — were to pour across
the Polish corridor into Germany in order to bring her
back from the idylls of Locarnos and Genevas to a
closer view of and contact with Soviet Realities, why,
then, like any defenceless maid of romance, Dame
Germania would have to seek effective shelter only
behind the exiguous plumage of the Gallic Cock or the
shaggy mane of the British Lion. That is Disarma-
ment.

The third, last and greatest element in eternal
peace is Drudgery, and in this Germans are expert.
The submissive thoroughness with which they toiled
or toil for Imperial or Alien exploiters has not changed
with the fortunes of war. Instances have been cited
before the Reichstag which deserve much wider publi-
city. The Ruhr miner worked better for the Frendi
generalissimo than for the German Stinnes. German
Railways are running on gold wheels under an alien-
ised directorate. French judges in occupied territory
dispense sounder justice than German judges. Vater-
landless, unnatural, unnational, Marxist wretches, co-
operating with the occupier of Occupied Territory have
rendered better service to Germany than all the

83

deputies in the Reichstag, chattering like monkqrs in
a cage-, etc., etc.

This is n& mandated or backward land in Asia,
Polynesia or Africa with a lack of ambition and
national feeling. No. It is industrious, muddleheaded
Germany. From day to day, in patient, profitless toil,
she vegetates. Fear of war may grip other lands;
Germany has won “ Eternal Peace ” undreamt of in
the philosophy of Kant. Is that Utopia?

Not altogether. Clad lightly and poorly, hatless
on principle, Germany’s young and old saunter forth
like Wandervogel or the ancient “ Pahrender Scholast ”
in order to seek in communion with nature an inner
peace which her outer tranquillity does not give. Such
outbursts are a denial of the present, a reversion to
the past. Never was such spiritual energy manifest in
pre-war Germany. Propagandist organisations have
tried to harness that energy to their own political ideals
or programmes.

The “ Steel Helm ” has had most conspicuous suc-
cess. It out-Fascists the Fascist; shames the Chauvin;
makes pale the Jingo. It has all the secret strength of
young K. K. K., with none of its cabal and tomfoolery.

Republican organisations are lifeless lepers in
their own land. Their post-bag delivers them insulting
letters. When, after the model of the “ Steel Helm,”
they undertake a propaganda tour in a village, they are
either denied ordinary hospitality, or received with
offal and refuse.

Communist organisations like the “Red Flag”
gesticulate, vociferate, perorate in public parks and
commons. They exchange invective or even blows
with inoffefisive police or pugnacious rivals. But their

84

histrionic efforts have no effect on the inner situation.
Germany’s continued drift away from Soviet Russia,
into the arms of England and France, tis an effective
index of the impotence of coimmunism.

It is a curious paradox and sad commentary on
our political unwisdom that the republic, which should
be a welcome half-way house between monarchism and
communism, a meeting-ground for extremists from
either wing of the Reichstag, should become its whip-
ing-boy, and bear the execration of all. Perhaps the
republic is only a sign-post, a bauble, a sham — toleriUfSff
by all because it gives them a like chance for preparing
the next putsch or coup, be it monarchist or spartacist.
Hotheads and partisans do not worry about the repub-
lic ; the republic itself dare not worry them. “ Truth-
seekers,” taking their cue from ex-royalty in their
midst, are undermining it unconsciously; the republic
dare not show them over the border. Internationalists
have no use for the republic, nor has the republic any
use for them.

Decidedly Germany’s Utopia is anywhere except
in her republic. More probably it is undiluted monar-
chism, a mirage of which floats with captivating clear-
ness before her eyes. Less probably it is Sovietism,
because its chances under the pressure of England and
France, applied through Locarnos and Genevas, have
become increasingly remote. But, all exceptions taken
and all reservations made, Germany was happier under
monarchism. Her Reichstag, despite the fiery denun-
ciation which crepitates on its benchesi, or on that very
ground, provides a safety-valve for mutual animosities.
It has no duty by the people. The parties are educat-
ing the people themselv«, and preparing them for the
final clash.

And Italy, Italia VincUrice e F*n<a,— where shall
we seek her Utopia? In tiie Panthe6n? IntheColIos-
seum? In thei Spielberg? In Caporetto? Or does it
lie in a bundle of twigs?

Just as England is the land of Problems, Italy is
a complex of queer Conundrums. Here are a few
agitating the public mind and conscience in Italy :

1. When is an Italian no Italian?

2. Shall the state exist for the individual, or the

individual for the state?

3. Is an Italian living in foreign lands a

foreigner?

4. Is the foreigner preaching universal brother-

hood on Italian soil an anarchist ? Shall he

be locked up or kicked out ?

5. Shall opposition be crushed down by force, or

assimilated into Fascism by gentleness ?

6. Which is better — Universal brotherhood or

Fascist fraternity? And finally:

7. Shall the Fascist state exist for the Fascist

citizen only?

The Fascists claim to answer all these conundrums
in deeds, not words, by converting Italy into an out-
and-out Fascist state. When every citizen, every civil
servant, every workman, every peasant, is a Fascist,
then there will be no opposition, no internationalists,
no demo-liberals, nothing but unalloyed Fascism.

Fascism has great expectations from the Italian
citizen, but to give the devil his due. Fascism has con-
ferred, on the Italian citizen certain advantages which
show up by contrast with other countries in Europe.

Firstly, freedom from industrial troubles is a
positive gain :

86

This freedom has been acquired at a price, it
must be admitted, 'but bow far it is a genuine gain
will appear if the relative economic chaos in England
and France is taken into consideration. In England
the big public services threaten to strangle the very
life of the nation, merely out of sympathy or solidarity
with any subaltern class of workers who may choose
to exploit their masters’ difficulties, and convert a
necessity for a cut in wages for a call for all brother
proletarians to “ Down Tools Everywhere ! ” That
is the solidarity of labour and if it is to be upheld wriTT
full logic and on every occasion, labour will be left
without a single, full, working-day in its calendar, and
cease to be labour at all ! What will it be then ?
So far as past experience shows and present tenden-
cks go, labour will be, wholly or partially, put on the
dole, and the tax-payer will be paying labour for not
doing its duty by him ! We have called England a
“ land of sour paradoxes.” That is one of the
sourest.

And France is not behind England in economic
indiscipline. An essential Government service in-
dulges in a one-hour strike or sabotage in the busiest
hours of a Monday morning, and all ramifications of
public and private activity from the wars in Syria and
Morocco to quotations on the Bourse pay the price of
a few civil servants’ levity in their own loss or suffer-
ing or worse. And these few Government servants
who throw the working of a big Government service
out of gear have not been traced to this day. Indis-
cipline could no further go.

Again, worsted in the Chambre, a political party
throws the whole country into the convulsions of a
general 24 hours’ general strike of protest against one

87

thing or another, Uappitit vknt en mangemtt. It
may he for 24 hours to-day, aiid for 24 days to-
morrow. Suocess or failure is a minor point. The
fearsome aspect of the situation is the certainty of an
economic stranglehold which may be applied at any
time. That certainty alone will be sufficient to stagger
credit at home, and to shatter credit abroad, and the
paper franc will go hurtling through tens and hundreds
into the limbo of the paper rouble, crown and mark.

Fascist Italy has been spared economic chaos, and
tnSt is the first positive gain.

Equally noteworthy is the strengthening of the
political situation. The Fascist may be right or wrong.
There may be as little stuff in his moonshine theories
as in communist miasmas, but the Fascist is a man of
flesh and blood, inspired by a principle and acting up
to that principle. Such a one is preferable to the
chamberfuls of jellyfishes and limpets who pullulate
elsewhere. Europe minus Italy is a nightscape politi-
cally.

Indecision, leading to loss of principle and breach
of faith has been the ruin of conservatism, liberalism,
radicalism, socialism. It is easy to be strong in oppo-
sition ; it is difficult to be strong in power. The path
of democracy is strewn with broken principles and
bleeding hearts. Of all political parties in Europe, the
Fascists alone are stronger in power than in opposition.
They do no lip-service to democracy. Except in that
horrid hybrid “ Demo-liberalism ” they do not even
recognise that term. They have acquired a giant’s
strength, and they use it like a gdant, tyrannously.
Their justification is their predecessors’ failure; their
excuse, their predecessors’ misdeeds ; their final
triumph, their predecessors’ complete undoing.

, A third boon which Fascism claims to be confer-
ring on Italy is a healthier public administration. We
are asked to admit at the outset that there cannot exist
such a monster on earth as an unpolitical public servant.
Such a one, if at all unpolitical, is a prey to all political
parties, a focus of intolerable intrigue. He is a child
of caprice in his weaker moments, and a slave of pas-
sion in his stronger. If weak, he is misery to himself ;
if strong, an irritant to the public. And in either case,
he is a danger to public, self and state

The Fascists are making the
condition of entry into public service. Fascism.
Obviously, a Fascist state must have Fascist servants.
This makes discipline good. For, it is easier to deal
with a troop of trained soldiers than with a mob of
heterogenous opinion-holders. As a penalty for indis-
cipline in his charge the Fascist prefect of Florence
had to go, regardless of a blameless record and con-
sternation in the land. Discipline is discipline, and
must be the same for all Bumbledom from Zabem to
Shanghai.

A step in the same direction is to replace amor-
phous local councils with governors and podestas, on
the assumption that the whole country is going Fascist.

Fascism, so constituted, so interpreted, so admin-
istered, cannot last for ever. It cannot even last for
a day. For the day the entire country turns Fascist,
there will be no further Fascism left in the land.
Fascism will then have become the lowest common
denominator for all, tiie jumping-off place for newer
and better and higher things. What other parties will
then spring into ^stenoe by fission or agglomeration
cannot be foreseen, ncu; is it worth foreseeing. Boon

prime qualif^ng

89

or evil, Fascism carries within itself the germs of its
own dfecay. Tyranny in little homoepathic doses may
put it off ; tyihnny in wrong doses may accelerate it.
But the twentieth century is not prepared to accept
undiluted tyranny for long. The plain average citizen
is no less a bourgeois in Italy than elsewhere. Fascist
swashbucklers may amuse him to-day, annoy him to-
morrow, but he will not stand perpetual subjection to
Fascist ideals. Ideals are like leaven, you cannot live
wipon them exclusively. The militarist cannot live all
his life in jackboots ; nor the worker in his claybox of
factory on clammy margarine and pumped air; still
less can the Fascist live continuously on a bundle of
twigs.

Life, to be worth living while you have it, must be
easy, simple, natural. That holds everywhere, and
still more forcibly in Italy where Life is Art, which
cannot be disciplined or dragooned or doped for the
benefit of any state. There is a future for democracy
in Italy, m the hearts of men, even if to-day democracy
is on the wheel.

EPILOGUE.

Europe’s Parliaments are everywhere in chains—
of their own forging, or others’ imposing. They have,
in a deep sense, ceased to function without friction or
restraint.

Each leading country, as we have seen in the fore-
going exposition, possesses the means and the possibi-
lity of making the most of its parlimnent, and of en-
suring that it does its duty the people. This clear
duty is apt to be overlooked in the welter of false issues.

90

which shortsighted deputies are tempted to r^se ir
order to secure transient triumphs at one another's o
even at the country’s expense.

No parliament is perfect. But all are perfectible

FINIS.